What Works
Pre-employment vocational training evaluation
Exploring what works for supporting young people with involment in the criminal justice system into good work, further education or training
The systems challenge
Existing evidence suggests pre-employment vocational training is a promising form of support for young people who face additional barriers in the labour market. However, there are currently limited high-quality evaluations of UK programmes, meaning we have less confidence in their impact employment, education, and training (EET) outcomes.
Our aim
To address this evidence gap and understand more about the impact pre-employment vocational training has on EET outcomes of marginalised young people by generating robust UK based evidence.
What are we doing?
We are working in partnership to test two established intervention programmes in England to understand:
- what impact they have on employment, education, and training outcomes for young people
- why and how the programmes work
- whether the programmes are good value for money
Mobilisation phase
Read more about Mobilisation phaseEvaluators will be working with our delivery partners to:
- Develop and refine the theory of change
- Design the evaluation and develop the trial protocol
- Assess whether it is feasible to conduct a full trial
The mobilisation phase will run until Summer 2026.
Evaluation phase
Read more about Evaluation phaseFollowing successful completion of the mobilisation phase and confirmation that the interventions can be tested through a randomised controlled trial, delivery partners will work with the evaluators to run the full RCT starting in Summer 2026.
In addition, we will conduct an implementation and process evaluation (IPE) and cost-benefit analysis to understand why interventions are effective (or less effective), and the value for money.
We anticipate final outputs will be available in 2028.
Building on previous work
This evaluation builds on insights from our Youth Employment Toolkit, which collates available, high-quality evidence on the impact of youth employment interventions and their components.
The evaluation is part of our What Works programme, which aims to generate high-quality, causal evidence about youth employment, education, and training outcomes.
Meet the partners
The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER)
Inspiring Futures, What Works: testing youth employment interventions ·
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