How to use the Youth Employment Toolkit

Currently, you can filter components by:

• Impact rating
• Evidence strength rating
• Cost rating

Components are presented in order of impact rating (high to low). You can change this to alphabetical using the ‘sort by’ drop down selector.

You can also use ‘keyword search’ to find relevant interventions.

For definitions and more information, click on or hover of the question mark icons.

To see a component’s impact on a particular headline outcome, and the strength of evidence supporting that impact, click on the the tabs for ‘education’, ’employment’ and ‘training’. The interface will dynamically respond to show the corresponding information.

The ‘headline’ figures for the impact of each component are averages across multiple studies.

Like all averages, they cover a range of variation that happens when interventions are implemented in the real world.

The headlines must be read alongside the detail about the nature of the evidence, the wider impacts of each intervention, and the role of context and implementation.

When planning future youth employment interventions, use the Toolkit insights alongside other kinds of evidence and expertise, including:

• Your own professional judgement, and that of your colleagues and partners, about what is likely to work in your specific context, for the young people you support and the situations where you work with them.
• The knowledge and experience of other organisations and experts who know about these young people and their lives; for example, the places where they live, learn and seek work, the challenges they face, and the opportunities and strengths they bring to their search for work and learning.
• The voices of young people themselves, including their reflections on how interventions might work for them.
• Evidence from studies that use high-quality research methods other than the kinds of experimental design that underpins the evaluations reviewed in the Toolkit.
• Other publications, resources and guidance, such as those that offer detailed advice on implementation, specialist information for your location, sector or context.
• Sources of good data about labour market outcomes, such as the Youth Futures Foundation’s Data Dashboard.

You can find studies of different kinds of intervention in the Youth Futures Foundation’s Evidence and Gap Map.

Evidence improves all the time, and sometimes changes as new studies are published.

We will update the Youth Employment Toolkit from time to time, adding new interventions and integrating new evidence for existing ones.

Please make sure that you revisit our website and that you are using the most up to date version.

Whatever version is live on our website will contain the very latest evidence and information that we have.

The Toolkit is a living resource – as the evidence grows, so does the richness and detail we can provide to bring to life the quantitative findings.

Some components will have related Youth Futures research, corresponding case studies and supplementary materials for employers.

Where this is not available, this indicates we have not yet grown our resources in this area. We will add relevant additional information as and when it becomes available.