Inspiring Futures

What did we do?

We provided £7 million in emergency funding to help 85 frontline charities and social enterprises in England respond to the pandemic.

Organisations used the funding to support over 15,000 children and young people aged 10 to 24 on their journey towards employment.

Flexible funding

Funding was targeted at projects that work with children and young people who experience discrimination or disadvantages that create short or long-term barriers to employment.

The flexibility of the funding enabled organiastions to prioritise their key areas of need, which included:

• Staying afloat during the pandemic.
• Continuing and expanding their delivery for children and young people.
• Adapting delivery to the COVID-19 context.
• Supporting families with basic needs.

Evaluating impact

We comissioned Cordis Bright to independently evaluate the Inspiring Futures programme.

It looked at:

• how the programme was implemented
• how the programme responded to the needs, challenges and opportunities presented by the COVID-19 pandemic
• the impact of the programme
• learnings and recommnedations for the future

Youth Inclusion

We worked with young peer researchers at every stage of the evaluation, in a process called co-production.

The young peer researchers were involved in:

• Designing research methods, questions and tools.
• Talking to young people supported by the Inspiring Futures programme.
• Analysing and developing the findings, recommendations, and reports

Key learnings

Five principles for emerged for supporting children and young people’s employment pathways effectively in practice:

1. Planning support collaboratively
2. Building trusting relationships
3. Tailoring support with specialist knowledge
4. Flexible support
5. Taking a person-centred approach

Recommendations

Recommendations were co-developed during a series of workshops with programme stakeholders, young peer researchers, strategic stakeholders with policy insight, and deliver organisations.

These included:

• Comissioners providing longer-term funding that can be used flexibly and for organisational development and capacity building
• Creating further opportunities to share learning with other VCSE organisations
• Improving delivery organisations access to funding
• Supporting delivering organisations to develop improved ways of monitoring and evaluation

Discover more details in the full reports below.