Youth Futures: Understanding their data visions

As part of our work with the Youth Futures Foundation we spoke with Chris Goulden, Director of Impact and Evidence at Youth Futures, about his vision for the Youth Employment Data Dashboard, and why he came to us.

Can you tell us a little more about yourself and Youth Futures? What is Youth Futures’ mission and how does the organisation deliver on that?

For the last 2.5 years, I have been the Director of Impact and Evidence for Youth Futures Foundation, joining from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Youth Futures was set up in 2019 and is now the What Works Centre for youth employment. We have hubs in Leeds and Birmingham, as well as an office in London, which allows us to work across the country. We have a team of about 50 now, spread across those 3 offices.

As a What Works Centre, our primary driver is to learn what works, find solutions and tie them to the right context. However, it’s not just about finding solutions; the priority is finding solutions that we can persuade others to implement, whether that is policy makers, employers or those working with young people on the ground.

We also have some of the functions of a typical think tank. My team covers research and evaluations, and in addition to that, we have a grants and investments team who invest in delivery partners, which are then evaluated by my team and our external evaluation partners. We also have a team that covers policy, comms, and engagement (especially employers). They are a key partner, and we need to work with them to hear from them, and also help them to understand the barriers faced by marginalised young people and ultimately help them find good quality jobs.

Is there a personal connection for you to the work that Youth Futures does?

Throughout my career I’ve been passionate about creating better evidence for social change. I’ve worked in the NHS, helping to encourage the use of Evidence Based Medicine, and at the Home Office and Cabinet Office on issues related to drugs, alcohol and crime policy.

I’m always trying to find ways to use research to help make things better for people, and have a strong personal commitment to helping those who are disadvantaged in society.

What is your vision for the data dashboard we’re creating with Youth Futures Foundation?

We want to ensure we’re providing a “service” of evidence, and to ensure we’re providing this in formats that people can use.

As an organisation, we’re keen to understand the drivers of the current situation, why marginalised young people are in that place in the first place. We’re also keen to understand how to help change young people’s futures for the better through evidence-based solutions. And we’re also really interested in the current situation - what is happening in the here and now.

Data has a key role in all of these - and this is where the dashboard will be important for us. We want to shine a light on the experience of young people, and draw attention to it.

Lots of data is published by organisations such as the ONS. They are a big machine pushing out data and information across a lot of different areas - that’s their function and role. But from a user point of view, it can be challenging. You can’t always easily see exactly what you’re looking for relating to young people unless you know what spreadsheet to look at. When should you use seasonally adjusted figures, and when not? Should you be looking at young people in full-time education or not?

So for us, it’s about making all that basic information and data available and understandable to our audiences. And doing it in a user-friendly way is key.

Who do you think is going to use the data & the dashboard - and how will it help your network and stakeholders?

Thinking about who our users are is a really important question. I’ve previously been involved in developing a dashboard, and over time it became less clear who it was really for. I’m really conscious of that experience, and keen not to repeat that.

We think the users will evolve over time too.

This first version of the dashboard we’re seeing very much as “basecamp”, and something that appeals to a generalised audience. We hope it will also help journalists and others who want to know the impact on young people of the latest labour market and educational changes.

We’re keen to ensure that we’re providing information to government departments such as DfE, HMT and DWP, and giving them what they need so that policy can be designed that is effective. Obviously, these departments have expert data users with greater access to sensitive data, but we hope to help by making it easy for them to see a quick overview of what’s happening, without having to dive into the ONS data.

Another key user for us are employers and practitioners supporting young people directly. We want to help them to understand the local labour market where they are based, and encourage them to support young people to join their business. We’ll need to engage with them in the next phase to understand what data will be specifically useful for them, as this is going to be very locally specific. Publishing vacancy data is the first step to delivering on that.

Working with our Connected Futures Fund partnerships are part of engaging with specific audiences to understand their needs. We’re working with Ipsos to understand the local labour market data in those areas.

And finally, we need to think about the ultimate beneficiaries themselves. At Youth Futures, we’re keen to bring young people into our decision making processes - after all, helping them is what we’re here for.

We have young Board members and representatives involved in our work. We need to speak with them to understand what our ultimate beneficiary as an audience wants.

One idea for the future could be that we become like a NICE for young people. They provide evidence-based guidance that is used by patients directly who can then take this information to clinicians and discuss potential interventions for their illness, backed by evidence of what works. In a similar way, we could ultimately provide evidence-based guidance for young people, to give them ideas of what works when they go to a JobCentre, or when speaking with career advisors at school. It’s a distant ambition, but that’s where we might look to aim.

We are currently automatically downloading and visualising a few specific datasets on the dashboard, including CPI, Labour Market and NEET data. Are there any other open data sources that you regularly use in your work or would like to see visualised on the dashboard?

We work with a lot of data, and there is so much out there that we could use in the future. We’re investing some time in mapping these out as part of our Data Strategy.

In terms of open data, the ONS released some of the Census data openly, which we think can provide useful insight. We’ve not had a chance to look into it much yet, but the ONS published something today using Census data that explores the demographics of individuals working in different sectors. It shows, among other things, that half of the waiters and waitresses are young people. Data like this can provide useful insight on where young people work, which sectors they occupy and which demographic groups are most likely to work in a given profession. This is especially useful when trying to understand economic barriers faced by young people.

While not open data, we also want to use Understanding Society, formerly the British Household Panel Survey, which offers a way of tracking people over time. This helps to understand more about the young people who are likely to drop out of the system and become NEET, and which experiences or interventions might influence a young person’s chances of finding work and good quality work in particular.

There is so much potential in linking datasets from across Government Departments to see longitudinal change in peoples’ outcomes and circumstances, such as is done with the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes (LEO) data set. Based on the National Pupil Database, this dataset tracks people as they come out of education and, by linking this with HMRC data on employment and earnings, provides a person-level record of labour market outcomes.

That frankly is our dream dataset. There are no concerns about sample sizes, as the dataset is so large, being based on a census. The data is pseudonymised, and as a user, you must apply to access the dataset through the ONS Secure Research Service or via DfE.

Although the LEO dataset is opening up a little, it is still quite difficult to access for many, and local organisations don’t have the systems and resources to make use of this data themselves. It brings issues around data protection, and makes it hard for them to share and link to other datasets within their local ecosystem, however there is a huge amount that Youth Futures can do to support local organisations on these fronts.

Linked datasets like these are a fantastic resource that will help Youth Futures, its network and delivery partners to understand the context and see where progress is being made. We are currently doing some exploratory work to develop simulations and scenario analysis to assess the impact of specific interventions and labour market changes on employment outcomes based on some of these data sources. It’s a fascinating area of research for the organisation that may alleviate some of the barriers to accessing this data.

How do you think working in the open will help your organisation?

We generate a lot of data from our own evaluations. Young people who come into contact with care is one of our 4 priority areas, as well as those in contact with the criminal justice system, ethnic minority young people and those with mental health problems.

In our upcoming first RCT, we’ll be tracking around 500 young care leavers and understanding their job outcomes to test the impact of an intervention. Whilst this data still contains potentially identifiable information, it will be pseudonymised and our aim is to add this to the ONS secure platform and link them to LEO, so that outcomes for these young people can be tracked over time. Of course, it’s vital to ensure we get the right consents and Data Sharing Agreements in place for this.

The Department for Education are working to try and develop a better specified predictor of the young people who are most at risk of becoming NEET, so that interventions can be introduced. We recognise that we’re all multi-faceted humans, and there will be multiple risk factors that influence an individual’s outcomes. However these models help us to understand how changes in the labour market, such as the current cost of living crisis, are likely to impact on young people, allowing us to develop well-informed and evidence-driven interventions, and to evaluate their impact and success.

Accessible data is therefore crucial for understanding the context of our work, and for developing effective interventions. By presenting this key context in one place that is openly available, we are removing the barriers that prevent people from accessing, interpreting and acting on this information. We also want to ensure that we are presenting the most useful and relevant information for users, which is why we are working in the open, gathering feedback and testing early versions of the dashboard with our network.

We’ll be developing this work further with Open Innovations to get the first version of our dashboard online and available. We welcome any feedback on the dashboard and encourage people to get in touch.