£15 million mentoring intervention to help tackle unemployment amongst young people

Youth Futures Foundation has announced Football Beyond Borders as its first delivery partner for the £15m Building Futures programme, a mentoring intervention for young people facing barriers who are at risk of missing out on further learning or employment.

 The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that around one in eight 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are not in education, employment or training (NEET), a challenge that has been on the rise, peaking at 900,000 this year.

Experiencing unemployment early in one’s career has been shown to have lasting negative effects, so testing preventative interventions, in the early teenage years, is vital to Youth Futures Foundation for the widespread changes needed to tackle this.

Funded by Dormant Assets and awarded by the government, Building Futures will develop and test a package of targeted support to build evidence about how mentoring can be used most effectively to empower students who are struggling.

During the initial phase of the programme, Football Beyond Borders will deliver personalised coaching, mentoring and wellbeing support to up to 500 young people aged 12 to 15 over a whole academic year. Seven schools from areas with high NEET rates across the North West, West Midlands and London will be the first to participate.

The schools in the North West include:

– Wardle Academy

– Sale High School

– Ladybridge High School

Students will have both one-to-one and group sessions, with personalised support, including the delivery of a social and emotional learning curriculum.

Mentors are trained to become relatable, consistent and trusted adults in the lives of young people and will have at least two years of relevant experience and qualifications, recruited to match the backgrounds and life experiences of the young people.

The aim is to increase engagement in education while improving wellbeing, to reduce young people’s likelihood of being NEET at age 18.

Building Futures will reach at least 5,000 young people from now until 2029, with findings from the evaluation tracking the impact on young people’s education and employment outcomes in the years afterwards.

Football Beyond Borders was selected as the first delivery partner due to its proven ability to build trust with young people in schools from socio-economically disadvantaged areas and its experience using therapeutic mentoring interventions.

Jack Reynolds, CEO of Football Beyond Borders, expressed delight over the partnership with Youth Futures Foundation, saying: “Youth Futures and Football Beyond Borders share a focus on developing an evidence base on the effectiveness of trusted adult relationships to achieve long-term outcomes for vulnerable young people.”

The quality of relationships between mentor and mentee has been found to be a key factor in achieving positive outcomes.

The design of Building Futures will have the strongest international evidence for mentoring. The first stage will consist of a test-and-learn approach with the selected partner schools to help build the most promising version of this programme for wider delivery and testing.

This will build to a multi-staged evaluation, including the undertaking of a gold-standard randomised controlled trial, which will test how mentoring influences employment outcomes later in life.

Barry Fletcher, CEO of the Youth Futures Foundation, said: “The youth unemployment and inactivity challenge across our country requires dedicated and long-term attention from government, employers, civil society and all our partners.

“This needs to be informed by the most robust evidence, of which Building Futures is an essential part.”