It’s as plain as the nose on your face. We want the government and policies to do what works best. How we invest finite tax revenues to make our lives better. How do we know what works, and who’s to judge what’s best? There are competing interests and conflicting claims. What’s best for one group may not be good for another.
It can’t be a blanket approach, not one size fits all. Our lives, the communities we live in and societal goals are interrelated, each multi-faceted and complex. So, where do we start?
In a democracy, it starts with what the government – national and local – has been elected to deliver, its mandate. This is less a detailed manifesto, as the shifting sands of politics moves the ground on which decisions are made. More a direction, clear purpose and goals. It’s what we want for and expect of citizens, a social compact if you like. Dealing with everyday challenges but delivering over the longer term for each generation to thrive – ‘what we want for and expect of young people’ is a driving force for generational change.
Once that direction is chosen it needs a firm foundation of policy-making, based on facts and the reality of young lives. There is an attempted shift in policy-making towards early help and preventative measures, removing barriers to opportunity with young people and their families and within communities, delivered – and seen to work – locally. It’s not enough to promise a better future. Reality bites. It is what we know works from the experiences of those it’s supporting, and readily understood by those not directly affected as being part for the common good, with clear purpose and shared outcomes.
Therefore, a strong evidence base is crucial to policy making. Recent governments have drawn heavily from ‘what works’ centres for cross-cutting issues and challenges to drive meaningful systems change.
Citadel’s work supports Youth Future Foundation’s‘Future for policy-makers’. It’s aim is to tackle the thestubbornly high level of youth unemployment and inactivity, with the national What Works Centre for youth employment, specifically focusing on marginalised young people.
Vicki Jones, Joint Head of Public Affairs and Stakeholder Engagement, told us:
“We want to see a society where every young person can achieve good work. We find and generate high-quality evidence to better understand England’s youth unemployment and inactivity challenge, and most importantly to learn what solutions work to address this. We do this through bringing together the best evidence already in existence and build on this by conducting original research and testing, and evaluating promising interventions to produce much-needed new evidence where there are gaps.”
Youth Futures works with national, regional and local policymakers, to build more impactful public policy that helps marginalised young people enter and stay in good quality education, training and work. The goal is to see England’s NEET rate for young people fall to match the best in the OECD by 2050, and gaps in education, employment and training outcomes for specific groups of marginalised young people to be removed.
“Matching the Netherlands’ NEET rate could move 567,000 young people into work or education, and boost the UK economy by £86bn in the long term,” said Vicki.
“In the short term, the public affairs team will work towards ensuring that high-quality evidence underpins more public policy that helps marginalised young people to earn and learn. The challenge is even greater for the most marginalised, who face systemic barriers to finding and keeping good work,” she explained.
“Therefore, to break the intergenerational cycle, we generate high-quality evidence and turn it into action, collaborating with policymakers, employers, and funders, and meaningfully engaging young people most affected by the system.”
This looks not just at ways of supporting young people into work. It explores the causes of youth unemployment, building an evidence base of early interventions and preventative measures to remove barriers for young people; and an asset base for young people to thrive, sustained in work over the longer term.
The recently published report, ‘Understanding drivers of recent trends in young people’s mental health’, explores the inseparable challenge of mental health and youth unemployment.
“This was the first study of its kind for England providing a better understanding than ever before about why mental health problems among young people are rising, and the different factors driving the growth of mental ill health among 14-24 year olds in England,” said Vicki.
“Previous efforts to understand the causes of young people’s declining mental health have often focused on examining drivers in isolation and many competing theories have been suggested. Our approach goes significantly further by evaluating multiple proposed explanations using a combination of data analysis and literature review, assessing the strength of evidence supporting each one and highlighting where important gaps remain.”
The research indicates that the decline in youth mental health is driven by a number of factors — including deteriorating sleep quality, growing financial insecurity, reduced access to non-clinical support services, and the influence of social media and smartphones. Gaining a deeper understanding of these underlying causes is essential to developing effective, targeted solutions.
Such targeted solutions can be strategic, including collaboration with Citadel and others on the role of ‘trusted adults’ in young lives, and national policies specific to 16-25 year olds as a discrete age cohort for policy-makers and funders.
There is also evidence and practical learning for particular challenges, for example care experienced young people:
“One of our partners is Drive Forward Foundation, who provide packages of support for care-experienced young people, designed to help them develop the skills and networks they need to find fulfilling employment, while also supporting them with the other barriers in their lives,” Vicki told us.
“We initially funded Drive Forward in 2021 to deliver support to 236 care experienced young people and then funded an independent evaluation to develop and test the programme’s Theory of Change and understand more about the young people’s outcomes, and also to explore the feasibility of delivering on an impact evaluation of the programme. We were delighted that the findings showed promising evidence and the delivery model is suitable for an impact evaluation which is why we have now commissioned a randomised control trial with 550 young people in London.”
Over the last 20 years of Citadel and in support of Youth Futures Foundation and the work of others to champion young lives, it is clear that lasting change can only be secured if it is based on facts and evidence of ‘what works’.
“We’ve had the pleasure of working with Citadel for several years on our party conference activity in particular, and we’ve been proud to play a key role in supporting the Youth Zone. Jonathan has been instrumental in planning an ambitious programme of events—including panels, roundtables, and receptions—designed to drive change in policy and practice, so that marginalised young people have the opportunity to access and thrive in meaningful employment”, added Vicki.
For Citadel, to get this right with young people is crucial for us all against the rising tide of populist politics. It through young people that we will achieve the change we want to see, supported in the present and ambitious for the future.
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