Supporting young people’s post-secondary transitions in London

Since 2019 The Centre for Education and Youth has been working with the Mercers’ Company to evaluate its Transitions Special Initiative. Through the Initiative, Mercers’ has awarded funding to a number of organisations supporting disadvantaged young people’s post-secondary transitions across London.

Alongside capturing the Initiative’s impact overall, we have been supporting the grantees to enhance their delivery in light of our emergent findings. Each year, we have worked collaboratively with Mercers’ and its grantees to identify the key issues they want to understand better. In the first two years, these have included issues such as moving in-person delivery online, and how youth voice can meaningfully improve programme delivery. CfEY has then designed bespoke evaluation tools to explore these issues in depth.

While we’ve been working on this, Mercers’ has extended the Initiative. It will now run for six years and involve a total of 16 grantee organisations, including Drive Forward Foundation, Career Ready, the EY Foundation, Brentford Football Club Community Sports Trust, and Dallaglio Rugbyworks.

We are delighted to be supporting this important Initiative. You can read our findings from years 1 and 2 of the evaluation, here and here.