Youth Service NEET impact evaluation  

Background on Youth Service NEET

Youth Service NEET is a voluntary, targeted programme for 16–17-year-olds (and some 15-year-olds) who are Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET) or are at risk of becoming NEET. Changes were introduced to the service in 2020, in response to evaluations that showed mixed results on the impact of the service.

The changes in 2020 included:

• introducing employment outcomes as well as continuing to focus on education, training, and work-based learning
• a deliberate shift to support young people facing the greatest barriers to education and employment, by targeting people who are at a higher risk of coming onto a benefit at a young age, and
• reducing the caseloads for youth coaches from an average of 43 to 20 young people per coach and adding pastoral support that extended to six months post-employment placement.

Impact evaluation approach

The main focus of the MSD impact evaluation was on whether the changes to Youth Service NEET in 2020 altered its effectiveness.

The evaluation measured the impact of Youth Service NEET by comparing the outcomes of participants by cohort (eg. 2013-2016, 2017-2020, 2021-2022) to matched comparison groups in the Statistics New Zealand Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI).

Key findings

The evaluation found that since 2020, Youth Service NEET has successfully shifted to supporting a more vulnerable cohort of young people. Participants after 2020 were more likely to have lower qualifications prior to starting the service and greater mental health support needs than earlier participants.

The evaluation found that after 2020, Youth Service NEET has maintained mixed impacts on outcomes. There was an increase in cost, which reflected more intensive support being provided to more vulnerable participants.

The service continues to be more effective than Youth Transitions Services (YTS), which it replaced.

Changes to Youth Service NEET in 2020 did not lead to increased time in education, employment, or training for participants overall. However, young people who started Youth Service NEET post-2016 achieved higher qualifications after one year, and this trend shows improvement over time.

In line with the enhanced focus on work readiness, after 2020, participants were more likely to be employed in the first six months after starting Youth Service NEET and less likely to enroll in study, compared to the comparison group.

It is still too early to say what the longer-term impact of the 2020 policy changes will be. Early monitoring shows a small lift in enrolment in education, training or work-based learning, but these early signs may change as more data comes through. COVID-19 had a strong effect on young people’s transitions and the labour market, so any early trends need to be read with care until we can look at more stable post-COVID-19 cohorts.