Low-Achieving Adolescents – Improving the non-cognitive skills to increase earnings in the long-run

Designing programmes to help low achieving young people make successful school-to-work transitions is notoriously difficult. Whilst the positive effects of programmes targeted towards infants and young children are well-documented, there are doubts about the effectiveness of remediation programmes targeted towards adolescents . But few programmes targeting adolescents include long-term follow-ups, and therefore little is known about the long-term effects of such interventions.

In this paper, we estimate the long-term labour market effects of Entry to Employment (E2E), an intervention designed to improve the non-cognitive skills of low-achieving adolescents in England. Using an instrumental variable (IV) approach, we find that E2E courses substantially increased earnings of participants in the long-run. The increase is primarily driven by a large and significant effect on the probability to be in employment. Placebo tests and robustness checks provide further support that the link is unlikely to be affected by unobserved confounders.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story @ The long-term impact of improving non-cognitive skills of adolescents: Evidence from an English remediation programme