Projects

WECA design for its Youth Guarantee Trailblazer is tailored to the region’s specific needs, spanning system-level leadership (e.g. skills, support and employment system mapping) to targeted cohort support (e.g. rural access transport subsidies and SEND work placements).

YFF is providing a grant to IES to explore the policies and services that support young people (14-30) on their journey to work and understand how they are tracked. Through desk research, stakeholder interviews and with support from a youth and an expert panel, IES will aim to understand how young people experience the current landscape of policy and what might work better. The desk research will map relevant policies for young people in four typologies - care experienced, experience of the youth justice system, young people with mental ill-health and young people with special educational needs. The research will also map data that track young people across the age range, by examining datasets and understanding challenges and opportunities associated with the data from the data owners. The findings will help YFF to identify where changes could be made to improve outcomes and tracking, especially useful for YFF's future programmes.

Many studies of summer job programmes examine impact on employment and education but there is growing interest in their impact on the reduction of antisocial behaviours, including youth violence and criminal activity. The initial evidence base on summer employment programmes offers some promise in terms of improving young people’s outcomes on these dimensions as well as their life chances. However, given the lack of a systematic review that estimates the extent of this impact, we cannot yet fully assert this. This current review seeks to fill this evidence gap.

Step Up is a PLIAS Resettlement project designed to support 120 young people aged 16-24 in Brent and Harrow who are unemployed/NEET and involved in or on the cusp of the criminal justice system. The project aims to support positive education/training outcomes, progress into meaningful, sustainable employment and a reduction in re-offending. Our evaluation will establish a project Theory of Change and participant journeys through the project. These will then be tested using: a participant pre-post survey; qualitative research with PLIAS staff, volunteers, stakeholders, employers and young people taking part in the programme; and analysis of management information collected by PLIAS. The study will also assess the feasibility for a future impact evaluation. The study will contribute to the growing body of evidence on what works being generated by the Youth Futures Foundation.

Youth Employment UK (YEUK) developed a Youth Friendly Employment Framework, which focusses on five key areas to address the barriers faced by young people entering and progressing in work, and make more high-quality opportunities available to young people. They now want to develop this into a Good Youth Employment Benchmark (with funding from YFF) – an online tool underpinned by high quality evidence. This will enable employers to self-assess and develop their practice. The key aim for the research is to provide evidence as to whether the existing standards in the framework speak to the needs of the youth employment system and, in addition, that employment outcomes for young people can be changed by the achievements of the standards. IES will conduct desk research into employer use of toolkits and benchmarks and review the YEUK framework. IES will conduct 15 employer interviews (a mix of focus groups and 1-2-1) to understand employers current practice around youth employment and youth employment frameworks.

We are supprting SomersetWorks to evaluate the initial design of a pilot to support NEET young people with compelx barriers to EET to transition into positive destinations. We will be evaluating progress of the intervention against targets, delivery and management, outcomes and impact, value for money, and lessons learnt for future activity, as well as identifying the best routes for sharing and disseminating this information. In particular, we will focus on understanding whether the holistic, community partnership delivered programme that combines therapies, education and employment is an effective method to break down barriers for the most vulnerable NEET young people across Somerset.

The project involves a pilot study of a literacy intervention called Catch Up Literacy® run for foster or kinship carers with children in Year 5 or 6. The project includes an impact assessment (run by our partner NIESR), with the primary measure being literacy measured by the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension (YARC). IES will also run an implementation and process evaluation involving surveys of children in care and foster/ kinship carers, and interviews with foster carers and the delivery team (those running the training) to find out about foster carer and child experiences of taking part in the project and changes in reading confidence and skills over time.

We will be focusing our research on the mental health among secondary school pupils in the Sussex Learning Network, the nature of the issue in Sussex compared with the South East and England, the factors that may influence student mental health and the impact that it has on attainment.

The GLA wishes to understand the scale and nature of mental health needs in its FE student population. This is a much under-researched area, althought evidence from earlier and later phases of education suggest these needs require consideration. IES will lead a programme of qualitative and quantitative research which will seek to provide information on the scale and nature of needs, as well as effective practices that FE institutions have put in place to address these.

IES will deliver an evidence-based assessment of ‘what works’ in tackling youth worklessness amongst those young people most distant from the labour market who face multiple disadvantages. This will include an assessment of the strength of evidence to supply a practical resource and a starting point for identifying future priorities for YFF, and evidence gaps. The method comprises a ‘review of reviews’, combined with an REA and call for evidence/grey literature.