Self employment support delivered as part of an active labour market programme to young people aged 16 to 24 is highly effective in enabling young people with an interest in entrepreneurship to start working for themselves.
Last updated: 26 August 2026
Negative impact
Emerging
Negative impact
Emerging
Unknown impact
Insufficient
Moderate - likely to require some intense, complex or specific resource needs for effective delivery
Headline insights about this component based on current high-quality evidence, where self-employment support is delivered as part of an active labour market programme to young people aged 16 to 24.
Positive
Self-employment support has an excellent success rate in supporting self-employment for young people with an existing interest.
The research suggests that self-employment support is likely to have a very large positive impact on young people’s involvement in self-employment at 24 months after the start of the intervention. The probability of an impact in this range is 100%.
The impacts of self-employment support may be higher for older young people within the 16-24 age group.
Positive
Programmes are associated with large reductions in the probability of unemployment. Participants are very unlikely to have worked for an employer or be employed by someone else which is unsurprising given the aims of the programmes.
Negative
Associated with a large negative impact on secondary school completion, reflecting the strong focus on a particular kind of work, rather than on gaining qualifications and generic skills for employment by others.
Self-employment support provides young people with advisory services and access to support, finance and markets for the development or growth of youth-owned businesses.
Any young person who:
Any UK organisation — business, charity, public-sector body or social enterprise.
Timescales vary very considerably, depending on programme aims, scale, and target group.
Funding may come from diverse sources or from a mixture of sources including:
Some programmes are solely or jointly funded by third sector, community and business groups.
Self-employment support can:
Calculations are based on insights from available high-quality studies on the complexity of delivery requirements and estimated associated costs.
Based on existing evidence, we’ve identified some common features that support the commissioning, design and delivery of effective youth employment programmes:
Design, fund and deliver outreach and recruitment activities that raise young people’s awareness, with targeted initiatives to reach young people with an interest in self-employment and entrepreneurship who are most likely to benefit.
Also consider how best to identify and engage the most suitable partners for a programme. Engagement should be timely and clear, in ways that raise awareness and facilitate recruitment, enrolment, and sustained engagement.
Design, fund and deliver programmes that:
A strong relationship between policymakers, learning providers, funders and community organisations including Mayoral Strategic Authorities and Local Skills Improvement Plan areas supports effective youth employment support programmes.
Design, fund and deliver programmes that foster collaboration with education providers such as colleges to improve access to relevant business experience.
Support providers and delivery organisations to accurately and systematically capture and communicate data and milestones and track programme outcomes. This may include structured and standardised tracking forms, or developing realistic programme-specific performance frameworks.
For funders and commissioners – ensure recorded data, reporting and assessment captures a full range of appropriate and relevant youth employment and related outcomes to help rich understanding to ensure rich picture of what programmes do.
Encouraging reporting commonly recognised metrics allows evaluation to be easily comparable and included in the growing evidence base.
Design, fund and deliver programmes that:
| Included studies | 7 |
|---|---|
| Location(s) | High-income countries |
| Outcome | Self-employment probability, employment probability, unemployment probability, school completion |
| Comparator | 'Services as usual' / Business as usual |
The Youth Employment Toolkit brings together evidence from robust studies in high-income countries that:
Find details of individual studies, as well as other systematic reviews of youth employment evaluations, in the Youth Employment Evidence and Gap Map.
More information about included studies can be found in page 55-60 of the full CNMA report. The specific evidence profile for self-employment support can be found on page 113.
The evidence strength ratings for self-employment support reflect the number of studies included in the meta-analysis. Studies were scored on reported design, sample size, approach to attrition, and definitions of interventions and outcome measures. More detail can be found in the technical guide.
Other research suggests that self-employment programmes should be carefully targeted to young people with an interest in self-employment.
Further impact evaluations and other research have an important role to play in identifying which young people are most likely to benefit, and learning more about the nature and quality of their self-employment.
The current evidence can be strengthened by taking a consistent approach to incorporating standardised metrics for education, employment and training outcomes as well as outcomes that indicate work quality.
If you have feedback or a question about the Toolkit, please get in touch.
