Improving Life Chances Of NEET Young People

This £10 million employment programme aimed to help young people who were not in education, employment, or training (NEET) get back into education or find a job or training opportunity. We were brought on board by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority shortly after the programme began. Therefore, our evaluation helped shape delivery of this programme and inform future commissioning and programme design.

The programme targeted young people facing multiple, complex challenges, many of whom had negative past experiences with education and employment. Because of this, we engaged with them sensitively to identify the ‘soft outcomes’ that they achieved (such as personal development and progress), and to measure how far they had come on their journey back into education, employment, or training. Our evaluation, which was fully compliant with government guidelines (HMT Green Book), involved:

• Holding formative learning workshops with delivery partners. Themes included how best to engage and support participants, and how to embed our evaluation findings in the design and implementation of future employment support programmes.
• Analysing changes in the local socio-economic context throughout the programme.
• Reviewing the programme’s logic chain to understand the relationship between the original goals, resources, activities, and the intended outcomes.
• Using GIS mapping to analyse where participants lived in relation to indicators like deprivation, to evaluate the programme’s reach.
• Conducting two rounds of in-depth interviews with 25 programme and delivery staff and more than 80 participants.
• Analysing participant and programme data to determine whether output and result targets were met.
• Carrying out a Social Return on Investment assessment to assign monetary values to both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ outcomes, and comparing these to other programmes to evaluate value for money.

We provided numerous recommendations, which are now shaping other employment programmes that aim to offer tailored support to those furthest from education or the labour market.