Senior Economist (Evidence & Evaluation)

Youth Futures Foundation is the What Works Centre for youth employment. We exist to address the significant disparities in youth employment for marginalised groups. We want to ensure that all young people are able to access and keep good quality jobs.The problem we are aiming to address is growing. It is alarming that there are 788,000 16-24-year-olds not in education, employment and training (NEET), a 13% increase in the last year and more than during the pandemic. 

The Senior Economist (Evidence & Evaluation) will work in a dedicated Impact and Evidence directorate, working at the heart of Youth Futures Foundation. You will be central to our ambition to create the largest repository of robust evidence and evaluations of what works to support young people into good jobs. In the directorate, you will support the Head of Evaluation (Data Lead), the Deputy Director and Director to ensure all Youth Futures’ investments are designed to provide robust evidence of what works.

The postholder will design, commission and manage evaluations, working across our main priorities of ‘Creating Opportunities (employer-focused interventions), ‘Building Capacity’ (programmes and interventions supporting young people directly) and ‘Systems Change’ (place-based approaches). The Senior Economist will manage impact evaluations and support impact evaluation methods (through a statistics or economics background) within the team.

Working closely with commissioned independent evaluators, programme staff, wider delivery partners and colleagues in our Grants and Investment directorate, you will support existing programmes to move towards undertaking an economic impact evaluation (often a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) or quasi-experimental designs). You will also work with colleagues to develop new programmes, which will improve the evidence base on supporting young people into good jobs by working with partners able to run larger-scale trials.

This role can be based at any of our hubs located in London, Birmingham or Leeds.  We currently operate a hybrid model of two-days per week in the office and three-days from home with regular travel across England.

The young people we aim to serve – and the challenges they face - are all unique. We are looking to build a team that reflects this diversity. Our commitment to inclusion across race, gender, age, class, religion, identity, and experience forms the cornerstone of our work. We are an equal opportunities, Living Wage and Disability Confident employer and encourage applications from a diverse range of backgrounds representative of our communities.  We offer a welcoming and inclusive workplace, where employees are encouraged to have a voice.