Youth Futures Foundation(YFF) is a new organisation that has been established in response to the Government’s commitment to allocate dormant asset funding to youth opportunities. The organisation will work to improve how young people a long way from the labour market are supported into meaningful employment, and help to address the ethnic disparities in youth employment rates.

Our work will broadly fall into three areas of activity:

• Support – funding and capacity building for the sector

• Inform – building and sharing the evidence about what works

• Convene – working across all the sectors who have a role to play in achieving our outcomes for young people

We are looking for a Head of Evidence and Evaluation to play a crucial role in establishing our approach to “what works” as we set up our operations. The work will feed into our grant-making and influencing, aiming to improve practice and policy to help our young people into employment.

Key responsibilities

The Head of Evidence and Evaluation will be crucial to ensuring that the YFF’s work is based in evidence and contributes useful findings that help the sector to be better able to address youth unemployment. Reporting to the Director of Policy and Partnerships, they will:

• Establish our approach to evaluation, including:

  • Setting evaluation standards and principles, that are appropriate for the sector, to help achieve our mission of improving how disadvantaged groups are supported into employment

  • Establishing our evaluation activities consistent with these standards and principles

  • Working with Director of Programmes and other experts to embed good quality evaluation planning into our approach to funding projects.

  • Work with grantees and external evaluators to design and undertake high quality, appropriate evaluations of our funded projects.

  • Work with Communications and Partnerships colleagues on dissemination of findings.

  • Work with the senior team to design an approach for monitoring and evaluating the impact of our own work

  • Work with the sector (public, private and not-for-profit) on establishing and promoting appropriate standards of evidence for youth employment work.

• Lead on ensuring the YFF has a strong understanding of the data on youth unemployment issues, including:

  • Understanding the different data sources; collating and interpreting accurate and useful statistics on our target population

  • Establishing relationships with other data experts to identify and undertake useful analyses of the data

• Oversee our research requirements, including:

  • Identifying gaps in the sector’s knowledge

  • Commissioning high quality research to fill the high priority, high impact gaps

  • Quality assuring any research we commission

  • Leading on the interpretation of findings, to ensure it can be clearly communicated in a way that influences our impact on the sector

• Establishing appropriate internal and external capacity to undertake all of the above:

  • Working with senior team to identify what additional internal resource is needed

  • Designing efficient and effective partnerships with external experts (including What Works Network members), and deciding on what processes we need to establish (e.g. advisory board, review processes, framework for partners).

Mindset

This is an exciting opportunity in a newly-forming organisation. As such, many of the systems and processes that are normal in an established organisation either do not exist or are newly forming. To be successful in this role, the candidate will need:

• to thrive when operating in uncertainty

• a proactive and flexible approach, able to identify and take forward opportunities and work effectively in partnership with others.

• a positive and can-do attitude, willing to roll their sleeves up to get into details where necessary

• a willingness to collaborate internally and externally to achieve our mission

• strong leadership communication skills

Skills and experience

The Head of Evidence and Evaluation will have:

• Relevant qualification in a social science or related discipline, ideally with a strong quantitative element

• Track record in commissioning, or managing, high quality evaluations (ideally quantitative and qualitative)

• Experience working with data and evidence in the employment/youth sector, or on related issues.

• Experience in applying and communicating evidence from research and practice to develop strategy.

• Broad understanding of the not-for-profit sector, and youth employment policy.