What Works
Drive Forward Foundation impact evaluation
Exploring what works to support care-experienced young people into employment
The 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.
The opportunity
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 are commissioning a Randomised Controlled Trial to better understand the impact of Drive Forward’s programme on employment, education and training outcomes in comparison to standard local authority support.
Aims
By evaluating the programme, we aim to build robust evidence on what works to support care-experienced young people to engage with employment, education and training.
The research will explore how the programme contributes to these outcomes, and other conditions which support achievement and sustainment.
What are RCTs?
Read more about What are RCTs?Randomised control trials are a type of high-quality scientific experiment originally used in medical research.
They are often considered the “gold standard” for generating evidence because randomisation is used to reduce or remove sources of bias, allowing us to rigorously examine cause-effect relationships between a change in practice, or ‘intervention’, and an outcome.
Overview
Mobilisation
Read more about MobilisationWe are currently undertaking a co-creation and mobilisation period to:
- finalise and pilot the evaluation design
- establish effective ways of working between partners
The RCT
Read more about The RCTWe will work with local authorities to refer 550 care experience young people into the 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 RCT 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.
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.
