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What is the issue?

Young people with experience of the criminal justice system (CJS) face significant barriers to employment, which can contribute to reoffending, social exclusion, and long-term disadvantage. Research highlights the importance of tailored, intensive employment support in improving their life chances, yet existing provision is often fragmented, inconsistent, or lacks robust evidence of effectiveness.

While various interventions aim to support young people in contact with the CJS, there is a lack of systematically designed and tested programmes that are both promising in impact and feasible for large-scale evaluation. Additionally, the challenges of engaging statutory partners, designing interventions that fit within existing service landscapes, and ensuring interventions can be rigorously evaluated using methods such as Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) remain significant barriers to progress.

This project, titled INCLUDE (Intervention for young people iNvolved in CriminaL jUstice Development and impact Evaluation feasibility for a future randomised controlled trial), aims to develop and test a replicable employment-focused intervention for young people with experience of the CJS, ensuring it is both effective and suitable for a future large-scale impact evaluation.

How are we helping?

Commissioned by Youth Futures Foundation, a consortium led by RAND Europe, alongside Dartington Service Design Lab and TONIC, is conducting an intervention development study with an embedded impact evaluation feasibility assessment. This work aims to co-design, test, and refine a promising employment intervention, ensuring it can be rigorously evaluated in a future RCT. Key elements of the study include:

• Scoping and co-designing the intervention in partnership with young people with lived experience (Experts by Experience Group), practitioners, and statutory partners, ensuring the intervention is both relevant and feasible.
• Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) and mapping of current service provision to identify effective approaches and contextual challenges across five London boroughs.
• Test-and-adapt delivery using a Rapid-Cycle Design and Testing (RCDT) approach, allowing iterative refinement of the intervention before large-scale implementation.
• Assessing feasibility for a future RCT, including the identification of referral pathways, key outcome measures, and potential sample sizes.
• Exploring scalability and a multi-provider trial, ensuring that lessons from the intervention design can inform a broader roll-out in the future.

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