Recommendation 11

The Department developed an evaluation plan to assess Kickstart’s impacts early on in the scheme’s development.42 This plan has two main elements. The first element is an analysis of Kickstart participants’ employment records, time on benefits, and earnings after their placements have finished, compared with the equivalent outcomes for similar groups of people who did not participate in the scheme. This should allow the Department to test the assumptions it made in the scheme’s business case about Kickstart’s impact on individual participants. The second element is a ‘process evaluation’ including a commissioned survey of participants, employers, and gateways.43 The Department expects this survey to ask employers about the extent to which the jobs they provided through the scheme were additional to what they would they would have provided anyway, in the absence of scheme funding.44 Beyond this, however, the Department is not planning to carry out a robust evaluation of the additionality of the jobs created under the scheme, or their wider economic impact. It believes that this would not in practice be possible: such an evaluation would require the comparison of employers in the scheme with a comparator group of employers which did not participate, but the Department considers it would be hard to identify such a comparator group, since the scheme operated so widely with employers across the nation.45