ACTIVE Support Youth East NEET Project

Supporting Hertford Regional College

The Youth East project is led by Hertford Regional College who work with over 60 providers across the East of England region to re-engage with young people not in education, employment or training (NEET). A key planning element of the project was to establish a baseline of the current NEET population across the region in relation to the location of delivery sites to ensure the supply of provision matched current demand.

Using TSM, ACTIVE mapped the location of the NEET population from Connexions data across the region and identified a number of locations of high NEET populations with insufficient delivery points to meet the demand. This intelligence has helped the Youth East project ensure that resources have been targeted into areas of greatest demand to maximise the impact the project will have in its lifetime.

Alongside the geographic analysis, ACTIVE also undertook a lifestyle profile of the NEET data to provide detailed social, demographic and marketing intelligence about the NEET population to support the intervention planning process. This intelligence is being used by the Youth East partners to ensure the courses offered are appropriate and engaging to their target audience, and that the marketing hits the mark.

The project team were invited to speak about the project’s progress to date at a recent London Region Post-14 Network conference on NEETs, held at the Institute of Education, and ACTIVE ‘s Andy Durman supported project managers Heather Freeman and Ben Wyse. Of particular interest to the 60-strong audience of further education practitioners was the ACTIVE analysis, which was described as “a very interesting use of data to support intervention planning” by conference chair Professor Geoff Hayward from the University of Oxford.