Talent Match

Nearly 1.5 million young people have been identified as not in employment, education or training (NEET). In the current economic climate there is a danger that more young people will become long term unemployed and move further away from being work ready.

In June 2012 the Big Lottery Fund is launched an ambitious investment of £100 million, to deliver creative ways to help young people find work or start their own enterprises.

During the design of Talent Match we spoke to a group of 16-25 year olds who are helping to decide how lottery money should be spent to tackle issues facing young people. Watch the video and listen to the podcast above to find out why they got involved, what it means to them and why it is so important to involve young people in these decisions.

Our funding will support young people aged 18 - 24 who have been out of work, education or training for over 12 months.

To make sure our investment has a deep and lasting impact we have targeted 21 specific areas in England. We’ve taken a range of considerations and the advice of stakeholders and young people into account when deciding where to target, and chosen the geographic areas covered by Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEP) as our start point. In each of these areas partnerships have been formed to bring about locally owned solutions to local youth unemployment issues and to further refine our chosen areas.

The 21 target areas and contact information for each partnership lead are listed below:

LEP Area	Contact details
Black Country	TMatch@wolverhamptonvsc.org.uk
Cornwall Youth Work Partnership	talentmatch@realideas.org
Coventry and Warwickshire	info@cswp.org.uk
Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire (D2N2)	youngandsuccessful@groundworknottingham.org.uk
Greater Birmingham and Solihull	talentmatchenquiries@bvsc.org
Greater Lincolnshire	talent.match@princes-trust.org.uk
Greater Manchester	talent.match@gmcvo.org.uk
Humber	talent-match@hlc-vol.org
Leeds City Region	talentmatch@yourconsortium.org
Leicester and Leicestershire	talent.match@princes-trust.org.uk
Liverpool City Region	talent.match@mya.org.uk
London	talentmatch@londonyouth.org.uk
New Anglia	talent.match@princes-trust.org.uk
North Eastern	Paul_Fagan@thewisegroup.co.uk
Northamptonshire	enquiries@enable.uk.net
Sheffield City Region	talentmatch@shefffieldfutures.org.uk
South East	talent.match@bbwcvs.org.uk
Stoke on Trent & Staffordshire	s.whalley@nulcvs.co.uk
Tees Valley	talent.match@princes-trust.org.uk
The Marches	richard@herefordshirecvys.org.uk
Worcestershire	talent.match@shaw-trust.org.uk

We are interested to find out more about which approaches work best, so in 2013 we appointed a partnership to evaluate Talent Match, led by the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research (CRESR) at Sheffield Hallam University.

As well as identifying effective approaches, the evaluation will consider the potential savings and other benefits that getting young people into work can make to the wider economy. Overall, we hope that learning from the programme and the evaluation will influence future policy decisions about working with young unemployed people.

The evaluation began in 2013 and will run until 2019. We expect to publish the first report from the evaluation in spring 2014.

Please contact us if you have any comments or questions.