Forging Futures

What did we do?

We worked with Cumbria Youth Aliance and independent evaluators to understand more about how the Forging Futures programme supports young people.

Programme overview

Forging Futures is a Cumbria-wide employment programme, which aims to help young people aged 16 to 24 years old, living in Cumbria, looking for work and claiming Universal Credit to move into employment. Young people are referred to the programme by Jobcentre Work Coaches.

The programme offers up to 12-months of support. The core activity is weekly one-to-one link worker support.

Optional wraparound activities include group sessions, referrals t for additional support or training, work experience, volunteering, or virtual internships, and up to six months of in-work link worker support.

Evaluation approach

We funded CYA to deliver Forging Futures to150 young people in Cumbria experiencing barriers to entering the labour market.

We commissioned Institute for Employment Studies (IES) to carry out:

• An implementation and process study, to explore how the programme is delivered and how and why it achieves outcomes.
• A feasibility study, to determine if the programme was suitable for an impact study (such as a randomised control trial)

We partnered with Ipsos UK on further scoping and design work to explore how a Randomised Controlled Trial might be conducted, but concluded that a robust design could not be implemented.

Building on previous learnings

Cumbria Youth Alliance was originally funded as part of Youth Futures Building Evaluation Capacity grants. Working with Ipsos and NPC, CYA was supported to improve their data management and evaluative capabilities. This work set a foundation for the Impact Pilot work carried out by IES.  

Next steps

We are supporting CYA to take part in the Department for Work and Pensions’ Employment Data Lab to better understand the impact of their programme on young peoples’ outcomes.