This week we ask some of our Rocket Scientists What is important for services working with young people?

Over the last year, we have evaluated a range of programmes supporting young people. Our clients include the Wise Group, Venture Trust, Scottish Waterways Trust, Princes Trust, and Centrepoint. This work has given us the opportunity to refresh our insights into what works when helping young people to improve their education, employability and financial resilience.

Using this insight we have asked our Rocket Scientists to share lessons they have learned about what works for young people.

Dina Papamichael, Assistant Consultant

For me, it is crucial to understand the intersecting issues which young people can face. For young people, issues around health and employment are so closely linked with self-confidence, social inclusion, substance misuse, homelessness and mental health. The most successful interventions enable a young person to overcome multiple challenges on the road to the programme’s primary objective. A programme which helps young people gain a qualification while developing a social network can have the impact of boosting self-confidence, developing work-related skills and increasing the level of stability in a young person’s life, while health services that focus on the social drivers of the sexual and mental health of its young people can obtain better and more enduring health outcomes.

Richard Scothorne, Director

The transition to work is a very tough one for many young people. Some have never really succeeded at anything at school and have often lacked the stable support of parents or other carers.  The most effective programmes we have worked with have provided different kinds of support – in other words, support that young people can chose from in terms of the quality of the relationship and their different needs from time to time.  These sources include trainers, mentors and personal coaches – someone who can provide the young person with a fixed point in a shifting world – and who will listen to them and stay with them through their journey.  In addition, working on shared tasks in small, well-managed groups – often in quite demanding conditions – can provide invaluable peer support, show people they are still appreciated even when they may be struggling, and help to build a young person’s confidence in dealing with others.

Natalie Dewison, Senior Consultant

Traditionally, the effectiveness of employability services has been assessed by looking at the number of people moving on to ‘positive destinations’ (education, employment, training or volunteering). For employability projects supporting young people facing multiple barriers to work, particularly those that only run over the course of a few weeks, this approach fails to capture the full impact of support provision.

We have found that often the most valuable outcomes are increasingly recognisable over time. Improvements in a young person’s confidence and outlook for example, which make them more resilient to knock backs and motivated by new long-term goals and ambitions. These things have the potential to greatly improve future job prospects. We are currently supporting three organisations delivering employability projects to evidence the sustainability of these outcomes. This means developing methods of longer term data collection that are simple, effective and enjoyable for the young people involved.

Max Lohnert, Assistant Consultant

Vulnerable young people often come from unstable backgrounds and face a range of intersecting barriers to entering employment. Considering this, our experience shows that there is no “quick fix” and that vulnerable young people benefit most from sustained engagement with employability programmes. For example, young people often benefit immensely from the trusted relationships with trainers and mentors and from the peer network they establish – and such relationships take time to build. However, since funding arrangements often require organisations to prioritise the number of young people being helped over the length of time they can engage with a single person, organisations have found other means to engage young people for longer periods of time: ranging from trainers or mentors staying in touch with a young person informally after the official completion of the programme, to building linkages and strong referral networks with other organisations along the employability pipeline.

Clare Hammond, Associate Director

The job market is becoming more complex and more competitive. Teaching young people to navigate this complexity is so important. This includes helping them look beyond the well-known and more obvious opportunities. How many jobs did you know existed when you were in high school? Doctor, teacher, engineer, nurse and banker? Probably. How about business analyst, GP practice managers, food safety consultant, project manager? Probably not.

The role that employers can play in helping young people understand the lay of the land is well evidenced. However, engagement between schools and employers often focuses around larger private sector employers. These large businesses make up a small part of employment in the UK. Most people will work for small or medium sized private firms, or the public sector. Where schools partner with small and medium sized businesses and the public sector young people are able to have a fuller understanding of the labour market.

Eleanor Sanders White, Consultant

There are many assumptions out there about young people which can interfere with our ability to reach and support them. Sometimes, the only thing in common in a group of young people is their age – we need to be careful about treating them as a homogenous group. A lack of confidence or fear of failure can often be misinterpreted as apathy. While some young people want to engage online, others need to develop a trusting relationship to engage. Many young people are technologically savvy, but some won’t have the digital skills required to engage online. While some young people will need a tailored and very supportive experience, others will interpret this as patronising. The way through this? Some of the most successful examples we have seen go straight to the source and ask the young people, others have shown a huge flexibility in how they engage with the young person to tailor for the individual walking through the door.

For more information on our work with young people get in touch with Clare Hammond, one of our Associate Directors clare.hammond@rocketsciencelab.co.uk or 0131 226 4949