About the Youth Employment Toolkit

A youth employment intervention is a structured programme or initiative aimed at addressing youth unemployment. They are designed to help young people transition into meaningful employment, skills development opportunities, or entrepreneurship.

Programmes often combine multiple activities or ‘components’ in a package of delivery. The Youth Employment Toolkit shows the impact of these individual components, made possible by the underpinning research method.

Read more about component network meta-analysis.

This method allows us to say that the impact of a whole programme is broadly equivalent to the sum of impacts of the components that it includes.

By presenting short, non-technical insight summaries, the toolkit offers a useful starting point for anyone involved in commissioning, designing and evaluating programmes to support youth employment.

The toolkit is primarily designed to be used by those responsible for allocating resources and shaping strategies:

• Policymakers in central or local government, or in other organisations and agencies that are involved in policy development. Policymakers may be most interested in the key findings and considerations for decision makers sections.
• Funders who design and commission initiatives and work with multiple stakeholders including delivery organisations to support young people to find and keep good work and training opportunities.

Employers and employer organisations involved in planning and delivering youth employment interventions or working in partnership to support young people may also find this resource useful.

The literature on interventions that aim to help young people into employment is extensive. However, it can be hard to navigate and its quality, relevance, and reliability are highly variable.

Additionally, most youth employment programmes consist of more than one kind of activity or type of support. This means that it can be difficult to work out which specific components within a programme have contributed to observed impacts on outcomes for young people. Understanding the potential impacts of different elements makes it easier to design and commission effective programmes.

By providing comparative insights on the impact of common intervention types and specific components – as well as associated costs and considerations – the toolkit makes it easier for decisionmakers to access and enact learnings and improve the lives of young people.

The current edition of the Toolkit is informed by:

1. A component network meta-analysis – pooling results from over 150 impact evaluations of youth employment programmes that have compared outcomes for young people who took part in an intervention with outcomes for similar young people who did not.
2. An implementation and process evaluation – exploring mechanisms and conditions for effective employment services interventions.

The component network meta-analysis uses a Bayesian method, which offers:

• a ‘median’ impact level associated with each outcome
• an account of the probability of different impact levels
• the ability to unpick the individual impacts of different elements of a multi-component programme.

The core research was conducted by a team from the Centre for Evidence and Implementation, the Institute for Employment Studies, and Monash University.

Insights are supplemented by learning from other Youth Futures publications and outputs, and from some of the publications identified in the Youth Employment Evidence and Gap Map.

The 2026 updates to the Toolkit are based on an analysis of ‘active labour market programmes’ as defined by the International Labour Organisation; this means that the Toolkit study can be compared directly with major international publications such as ILO’s review.

The sections that address apprenticeships and summer jobs programmes are based on earlier commissioned analysis.

The toolkit currently includes information about 17 youth employment intervention types or components. This breaks down into insights on 15 active labour market programme components (published in 2026), alongside findings for apprenticeships and summer jobs (published as part of the first edition using different methodology). [Link to page anchor section]

The front page lists all components and shows corresponding impact ratings across three headline outcomes (education, employment and training), alongside cost and evidence strength ratings.

• Impact rating = indicating the scale and probability of the difference the intervention can make to each outcome. The levels of impact are based on comparisons with international studies of youth employment programmes. [Link to page anchor section]
• Evidence strength rating = indicating the amount and type of evidence for the impact rating. The evidence strength rating is based on an examination of the underpinning studies and the outcomes of the analysis. [Link to page anchor section]
• Cost rating = indicating the likely level and nature of the resources needed to implement the intervention [Link to page anchor section]

Each component has a specific landing page which presents more detailed information, where available, about:

• considerations for decision makers involved in designing, funding and commissioning youth employment interventions
• the kinds of evidence used in the underlying research
• links to additional resources, related research and supplementary materials
• work quality outcomes (job duration, hours worked, and pay)
• the kinds of vocational learning and training that young people enter
• what the component typically involves, including definitions, funding sources and typical features
• potential benefits to both young people and employers offered by the component

It also provides an estimated causal impact of each component in numbers and percentage points to help illustrate the potential difference made compared with services as usual – the ‘additionality metric’.

The toolkit also has supplementary material that supports how to use it and links to technical guide and other blogs and summaries.

Employment support services 

• Employment coaching – New
• Employment counselling – New
• Financial assistance – New
• Job search preparation – New
• Job search assistance – New

Employment experience 

• Apprenticeships – As 2023
• On-the-job skills training – Updated 2026
• Paid temporary work experience – New
• Summer jobs – As 2023
• Unpaid temporary work experience – New

Self-employment support 

• Self-employment support (combined insights on business skills training, advice and mentoring, and financial and start-up support) – New

Subsidised employment  

• Subsidised employment  Wage subsidies  – Updated 2026
• Public works – New

Skills development 

• Basic skills training – Updated 2026
• Soft skills training (formerly life skills) – Updated 2026
• Behavioural skills training – New
• Off-the-job skills training – Updated 2026

The toolkit presents insights for three headline outcomes:

• Employment – recent employment (a young person has held a job at any point in the 12-24 months after an intervention starts
• Education – corresponding to attaining GCSEs or English Level 2 qualifications
• Training – a composite measure of engagement in different kinds of technical and vocational education and training, corresponding to NVQ Levels 4 and 5 and equivalent diploma courses and foundation degrees in England

For clarity and consistency, all outcomes are standardised to a point of 24 months following the start of the youth employment programme.

Find out more about how outcomes are defined and derived in the technical guide.

Please note – for apprenticeships and summer jobs, the Toolkit offers a rating for their likely impact on employment only, as well as an assessment of strength of the evidence behind this rating, and an estimated cost rating. This is based on earlier commissioned work and was not included in the more recent analysis of active labour market programmes.

The impact rating is an assessment of the likely median level of impact on education, employment and training outcomes for common individual components of active labour market programmes.

This assessment is based on meta-analysis that pools information about impact levels from numerous evaluations of similar youth employment programmes.

The impact rating categories are:

• High positive
• Moderate positive
• Low positive
• Little to no impact
• Negative
• Unknown

The technical guide to the Youth Employment Toolkit contains more information about how the impact rating was calculated.

To estimate the possible impact of multi-component programme on an outcome, users can add the impacts of all the components that it includes. For example, the median impact of a programme including basic skills training, employment coaching and a wage subsidy is likely to be close to the sum of the individual impacts of these programmes. Although all three have a median impact in the ‘low’ category, their cumulative impact could be higher than this.

The research summarised in the toolkit was conducted across many different high-income countries and prevailing economic conditions between 1993 and 2025; The reported median findings inevitably cover a degree of variation in all cases. The actual identified impact of any programme depends on how, where and when it is implemented, and the approach to evaluation (for example, a randomised controlled trial vs a quasi-experimental design).

The evidence strength rating is an assessment of the degree of confidence that can be placed in the impact evaluations included in the underpinning CNMA. It is based on the number of studies that contributed directly to the estimate, and the relative precision and magnitude of the estimate.

It should be interpreted within the context that all studies included in the toolkit are high-quality, peer-reviewed impact studies. The rating indicates what can be understood from what has been reported.

The evidence strength categories are:

• Well-supported – backed by a strong and consistent body of high-quality evidence showing reliable positive impact.
• Consolidating – supported by promising evidence, though findings are still building and may be less consistent or extensive.
• Emerging – early indications of impact exist, but the evidence base is currently limited in scale or quality.
• Insufficient – there is not yet enough robust evidence to draw conclusions about impact.

This assessment is based on the:

• number of studies included in the meta-analysis for each component type
• size of the identified median effect size
• size of the ‘credible interval’ for the median effect size
• geographical diversity of the underpinning studies

The method used in the underlying analysis accounts for several aspects of study design and quality (within the overall quality criteria for inclusion). Therefore, these factors are not included in the separate evidence confidence rating.

It is only possible to assess a study based on the information reported. A lack of information can lead to a lower rating than might have been assigned if the same evaluation had been described in greater detail.

The technical guide to the Youth Employment Toolkit contains more information about how the evidence strength rating was calculated.

The cost rating reflects how intensive or complex the delivery resources need to be to implement each intervention or component effectively. It also reflects the extent to which new, exclusive or unique resources need to be developed (‘specificity’).

For example, on-the-job training is typically delivered in a specific workplace setting whereas soft and behavioural skills could be more easily co-delivered in the same location.

The more intense, complex or specific the provision needs, the higher the expected associated cost.

The programmatic nature of many youth employment interventions makes it difficult to identify the financial costs of individual components. Fewer than half of evaluations of youth employment programmes in high income countries include any information about programme costs. The information about the actual figures for the costs of different elements of a multi-component programme is limited.

For these reasons, we have taken a cost-description approach to estimate the rough relative costs, rather than provide absolute figures.

The cost rating categories are:

• Low
• Moderate
• High

The ratings offer decision makers a framework to help estimate the indicative costs of delivery, based on context-specific factors and considerations.

Please note, that costs vary considerably depending on programme duration, setting, and scale.

Overall, the cost rating will be higher when delivery resources:

• Are specific to an intervention and can’t easily be combined with other intervention types, activities, or services as usual.
• Are ongoing, e.g., continuous oversight or assessment.
• Come from multiple sources, e.g. central government, employers, education providers where additional co-ordination may be required and may result in or be affected by inefficiencies.
• Include demands for specialist expertise or qualifications, which often incurs higher recruitment and retention costs, salaries, and/or training and support costs.
• Involve specialised equipment or settings, e.g. occupation-specific tools and machinery which may require additional expenditure

The technical guide to the Youth Employment Toolkit contains more information about how the cost rating was calculated.

The additionality metric provides an illustrative figure for how each component might impact ‘recent employment’ for a population of NEET young people in England.

The percentage point change shows the “additional” benefit a component or programme provides compared to what would likely happen anyway (‘business as usual’).

It is calculated as the absolute change in the percentage of young people who would likely remain NEET at 12 to 24 months, compared to the base line estimate of the number of NEET young people who would be likely to get a job in the 12-24 months after a fixed point if they didn’t take part in a youth employment intervention.

In the Toolkit, this percentage point change is expressed as the absolute number of additional young people who are NEET who would be in employment compared. For example, if the percentage point change is 3%, the difference made by the component equates to 3 additional young people for every 100 young people who are NEET.

Note that this figure will vary depending on the underlying NEET rate for the population who receive an intervention.

The highest impact on employment presented in the Toolkit is a 10 percentage point increase, the equivalent of 10 in 100 additional young people.

The Youth Employment Toolkit can be used alongside our other Youth Futures’ evidence resources:

• The Data Dashboard – quick access to current data on youth employment, unemployment, inactivity and NEET rates, as well as information about [update depending on where we are with the latest version]
• The Youth Employment Evidence and Gap Map (EGM) – a visual representation of the range, quantity and strength of available global evidence for the impact of different interventions to support youth employment on a range of outcomes.

The Youth Employment Toolkit answers one key question: is this intervention likely to make a difference? It presents evidence drawn from robust reviews of published impact evaluations and is based on one very specific type and quality of study: good quality counterfactual quantitative impact evaluations.

Where there are gaps or exclusions in the information reported, this usually reflects a lack of available high-quality evidence, rather than a judgement about a programme’s effectiveness. Where information about a particular outcome isn’t included, this means that no evidence was available, not that the intervention doesn’t have an impact on that outcome. Where a particular kind of intervention isn’t included in the Toolkit, that just means that we have not yet commissioned the research that would help us to include it.

The Toolkit includes high-level information on considerations for decision-makers, but is not intended to offer a comprehensive ‘how to guide’, nor does it present detailed practitioner perspectives, case study insights or practice guidance on how to run a specific programme on the ground.

Lots of other kinds of evaluation are conducted and provide valuable information of different kinds such as how and why interventions work, with extensive detail about how to achieve the optimal conditions for success.

For example, our mixed methods review of youth employment interventions. The Toolkit is just one kind of evidence resource.

The first edition, launched in 2023, presented information on six common intervention types designed to improve employment outcomes for young people:

1. Apprenticeships
2. Basic skills training
3. Life skills training
4. Mentoring and coaching
5. On-the-job training
6. Off-the-job training

It drew on findings from 60 impact evaluations conducted between 1993 and 2020 which were synthesised in a network meta-analysis that used a frequentist approach, and reported the impact on employment at any point following the delivery of the intervention, not just within a fixed, follow-up window.

The first edition included insights on wage subsidy programmes at launch, with summer jobs added in 2025; both via stand-alone evidence reviews.