career ahead
Evaluation: feasibility and pilot study
Making the Leap and Youth Futures Foundation
Run by Making the Leap with support from the Youth Futures Foundation, Career Ahead supports young people to develop the soft skills and cultural capital necessary to find and take advantage of opportunities when they leave school at 16. Dartington is carrying out a pilot study to determine whether Career Ahead can be delivered as intended and contribute to improvements in skills, capital and education and employment outcomes.
The need
Career Ahead has the potential to help socially disadvantaged young people across the UK gain access to further education, employment, and training. Yet the intervention is a complex, multi-faceted programme that has never been delivered before in its current form. Before it can be scaled up, Career Ahead needs to be further developed and its potential for improving outcomes better understood, as well as the contingency of these outcomes on the contexts surrounding delivery of and participation in the programme.
Our response
Dartington will help Making the Leap and Youth Futures Foundation to develop, test and learn about the Career Ahead programme through a theory-based, participatory pilot study. The evaluation will help Dartington, Making the Leap and Youth Futures Foundation to:
(i) develop and test the programme theory underpinning Career Ahead, including mechanisms of change and relevant contextual factor;
(ii) design and deliver improvements to the Career Ahead model and;
(iii) consider the most appropriate future evaluation design for Career Ahead.
Our work started in June 2021 and is concluding in April 2023.
For more information, contact: