Resurgo was at the House of Commons earlier this week, sharing the findings from the government’s employment Data Lab which evaluated the Spear Programme and found it significantly improved young people’s chances of getting a job.

The event with Impetus was hosted by Stephen Timms MP and shared the importance of the findings of the government’s Employment Data Lab, which evaluated the Spear Programme last year.

Stephen Timms MP said: “[Spear] is an outstanding model for how to support unemployed young people into work. […] The churches that have participated in Spear have proved to be such a great place of nurture for so many contemporary young people who’ve had difficulty finding jobs.”

Attendees also heard from Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy & Research at Impetus, who said: “Ultimately, none of us, from the government down, can fund what works unless we actually know what works.

“I want to call out the fact that the Spear Programme is one of the most proven employment support programmes in the country, and these people are still trying to make it better. I don’t know what that says about their mentality – but whatever it is, can we bottle that and spread it more widely?”

The data lab provided rigorous benchmarking showing that the Spear programme is effective at helping NEET young people join the labour market. They found that attending the Spear Programme reduced a young person’s chance of being NEET after a year by 17%.

The programme focuses not only on the hard skills needed to find work, such as CVs and interview training, but also on soft skills such as mindset change, making small talk and the hidden rules of the workplace. The Data Lab allowed us to track over 950 young people who’ve been through the programme and track their outcomes for two years, looking at their employment status, how long they stayed in work vs being NEET and, most importantly, how they performed against a comparison group of young people who didn’t do the programme.

Read more about Resurgo’s impact work here.