An economic evaluation of the National Careers Service

The National Careers Service is a nationally branded careers and skills advice service that is available free to adults and young people in England. The aims of this project were to undertake similar analysis to that completed in 2012 for the Next Step service, including: (1) conducting a detailed analysis of employment and learning outcomes for National Careers Service customers; and (2) addressing the issues raised within the previous study and coming up with ways to overcome and answer them, in particular how to improve the comparison group - the analysis compared the outcomes of individuals in receipt of National Careers Service support and advice (the treatment group) with a sample of individuals that were not in receipt of the careers advice from the service, but had similar personal, socioeconomic and labour market histories as the treatment group (the counterfactual group).

Given the fact that the study could only match those National Careers Service customers that have been in receipt of publicly funded training in the academic years 2008-09 to 2013-14 inclusive, the key finding is that although a positive impact of the National Careers Service on employment or benefit dependency outcomes could not be identified, it was possible to identify a relatively strong positive effect in relation to education and training that persisted across the entire post-support period for this group.

Edited excerpts from publication. Show less