East London Advanced Technology Training (ELATT)
Project summary
ELATT were awarded a grant from Youth Futures Foundation (YFF) to deliver a programme of support to 150 young people, aged 16-24 in London.
ELATT used YFF funding to provide wrap-around employability support to four learner groups:
- Adult Life Skills (ESOL) provision in the community across London and online aged 19-24;
- Adult IT vocational and technical learning provision delivering online to people aged 19-24;
- Sixth form provision, delivering predominantly IT vocational and technical courses in person at the ELATT centre in East London to learners aged 16-24;
- Sixth form ESOL provision for people aged 16-19, often asylum seekers, Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children (UASC) and refugees.
YFF wanted to understand ELATT’s learner support model and its underpinning programme theory; to develop, evidence, and evaluate ELATT’s theory of change; and to understand the feasibility of evaluating ELATT’s model using an impact evaluation (randomised control trial or quasi-experimental design). The Institute of Employment Studies was awarded an evaluation grant to answer these questions.
There were three strands to the evaluation:
- A scoping stage to understand ELATTs support model, theory of change and young people’s participant journeys;
- A process study to understand and evidence the theory of the support model, including and how and why participants did or did not achieved outcomes;
- An impact feasibility study to explore options for future impact evaluation.
The evaluation drew on evidence from:
- Management Information
- Surveys and interviews with programme participants
- Interviews with ELATT staff
Evaluation conclusions
Evidence from the evaluation indicated that ELATT’s Theory of Change was plausible, and that ELATT provision demonstrated evidence of promise. The positive outcomes achieved by sixth form learners (many of whom have special educational needs and EHCPs) included increased engagement with education; a more positive attitude to learning; gaining level 2 and level 3 qualifications; and progression onto higher levels of education or into more ‘mainstream’ education providers, such as mainstream FE colleges. The majority of adult IT vocational and technical learners completed one or more courses and gained a qualification, and half went into education, employment or training after ELATT. In addition, just over half of all 19-24-year-old adult ESOL learners completed a course and achieved a qualification, despite most of them not being on GLA-funded courses with an expectation to achieve a qualification.
The key factors contributing to these positive outcomes were reported by staff, partners and learners, to include:
- A supportive learning environment, with teachers that care, listen and are available to learners within the small college setting;
- A flexible approach to learning, with learners able to enrol into the sixth form throughout the academic year, and increase and decrease their learning to fit around physical and mental health problems,
- Comprehensive wrap-around support;
- Good quality conversations about employment, careers and educational pathways.
Based on the findings from the feasibility study, YFF decided that the programme of support that was being offered by ELATT was not suitable to take forward to an impact evaluation. The challenges to delivering an impact evaluation included: the programme not being in a steady state, challenges identifying a suitable counterfactual / control group, and practical limitations on scaling up ELATT’s provision to meet the required sample sizes for an impact study.