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. Our evaluation, both during and after the programme, helped shape delivery and inform future commissioning and programme design. We were brought on board by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) shortly after the programme began.

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’—such as personal development and progress—that they achieved, and to measure how far they had come on their journey back into education, employment, or training. Our evaluation, fully compliant with government guidelines (HMT Green Book), involved:

• Holding formative learning workshops with delivery partners to focus on how best to engage and support participants.
• 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 in-depth interviews with programme 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.