Call for evidence: EDI initiatives for young people from minoritised ethnic backgrounds

An important part of the Youth Futures Foundation’s approach is to find and generate high-quality evidence to better understand England’s youth unemployment and inactivity challenge and, most importantly, to learn what solutions work to address this. In the current project, Youth Futures are interested in what works to engage employers to implement equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives for young people from minoritised ethnic backgrounds. The study focuses specifically on Black, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi ethnic identities.

Youth Futures is seeking to capture high-quality evidence on what works in engaging employers to take action on supporting employees from minoritised ethnic backgrounds, especially young people aged 16-24, in areas of recruitment, retention, and progression within employment. We are also particularly interested in evidence from behaviour insights approaches to behaviour change among employers.

Youth Futures have commissioned the Institute for Employment Studies to lead this rapid evidence review. To capture this evidence, IES will systematically interrogate academic databases and national and international policy evidence sources for materials to include. However, there is likely to be good quality evidence that is not in the public domain or that stakeholders wish to recommend to the review. The purpose of this call is to capture that evidence.

We hope this review will identify findings useful for Youth Futures and for employers aiming to tackle youth unemployment. It will highlight effective practices that help engage employers to take action on EDI impacting recruitment, retention and progression, how to tackle and address prejudice and discrimination and draw lessons from transferable learning in other areas, such as employee wellbeing. The findings will be published in early 2025.

Types of evidence requested

IES will apply the NESTA standards of evidence along with the Mixed Methods Critical Appraisal Tool to evaluate the quality of the evidence. Quality criteria for including evidence will cover independence of evaluation as well as rigour and validity of methods applied. Studies that establish causality will be prioritised for review (Nesta Levels 3-5 where possible).

The evidence we are seeking will be:

• Studies on what promotes employer action on EDI against the following outcomes of interest: recruitment; retention; progression/development; organisational enablers such as culture, leadership, line management, lived experience; organisational barriers such as resources, norms, unconscious bias; impact on workplace prejudice/discrimination; systemic changes; inclusion
• Evidence using behavioural insights that promote employer action on EDI
• Evaluation and research studies that capture outcome measures, ideally with a comparison group or pre/post-measures
• From the UK or OECD countries
• Published in English
• Published from 2010 onwards

How to submit evidence

We invite anyone with relevant research to submit their evidence for consideration as part of this review.

Please submit evidence before 31st October 2024

Electronically using the email:  edievidence@employment-studies.co.uk.

You will be asked for the following information and will be able to upload a pdf document of your evidence:

• Abstract/summary [describe the intervention, who funded it, who delivered it, and what the outcomes/impacts were]
• Target groups [who was supported: were young people from minoritised ethnic backgrounds supported]
• Impact measures [what outcomes were measured and how – we are interested in a wide range of EDI initiatives by employers across recruitment, retention and career progression, organisational culture, leadership etc.]
• Type of evaluation [independent quantitative-counterfactual (RCT/QED), quantitative-non-randomised (pre/post, comparative without a matching design) quantitative-descriptive, mixed methods, qualitative]
• Contact name:
• Contact email:
• Consent to pass contact information to Youth Futures: Yes/No

Contacts

For any further queries you can write to: