What Works
Care to Career impact evaluation
Exploring what works to support care-experienced young people into employment
The systems challenge
Care experienced young people experience significant marginalisation within the labour market.
They are much more likely to be not in education, employment or training compared to their peers and often encounter precarious employment conditions once in employment.
Our aim
Through our continued partnership with Drive Forward and independent evaluators, we aim to build robust evidence of what works to support care-experienced young people into good work.
What are we doing?
We want to better understand the impact of Drive Forward’s Care to Career programme on employment, education and training outcomes for care-experienced young people in comparison to standard local authority support.
To do this, we are working towards a randomised controlled trial (RCT) and are also commissioning a cost-benefit analysis and an implementation and process evaluation.
The research will explore how the programme contributes to employment, education and training outcomes, and other conditions which support achievement and sustainment.
Overview
The programme
Read more about The programmeCare to Career provides a package of individualised support designed to help care-experienced young people develop the skills and networks they need to find fulfilling employment, while also supporting them with the other barriers in their life.
Support typically includes:
- a mix of tailored one-to-one support
- intensive employability skills training
- in-work mentoring support and opportunities provided through working in partnership with corporate partners, prospective employers and local authorities
Mobilisation & feasibility
Read more about Mobilisation & feasibilityWe undertook a co-creation and mobilisation period to:
- finalise the evaluation design
- establish effective ways of working between partners
- assess feasibility
Evaluating impact
Read more about Evaluating impactWe are working with local authorities to refer 710 care experience young people into the pilot trial.
Around 50% will receive Drive Forward’s programme of support, with the remaining young people accessing the usual support offer from their local authority.
The pilot trial will assess the impact of Drive Forward’s programme through comparing the EET outcomes of those receiving support from Drive Forward and those receiving the usual local offer provided by their local authority.
The pilot will determine whether the trial can be scaled to a full RCT.
Building on previous work
We awarded Drive Forward a grant in 2021, as part of our What Works programme.
Over two years, Drive Forward delivered support to 236 care-experienced young people.
The programme was independently evaluated through:
- a process study – to develop and test the programme’s Theory of Change and understand more about young people’s outcomes
- a feasibility study – to explore the feasibility of delivering an impact evaluation of the programme
The findings showed promising evidence, and that the delivery model is suitable for an impact evaluation.
Meet the partners
The Policy Institute – King’s College London
Evaluation panel, Research & evaluation partner
View partner
