Do summer education and employment programmes make a difference to young people who are disadvantaged or at risk of achieving poor outcomes, and if so, to what extent and how do they do this?
Key messages
- The evidence suggests that summer education programmes lead to an improvement in some education outcomes among the disadvantaged or ‘at risk’ young people involved.
- The evidence suggests that summer employment programmes have a limited or no impact on the employment or education outcomes of disadvantaged or ‘at risk’ young people, although there appears to be an impact on ‘softer’ outcomes, such as job readiness or socio-emotional skills, which might lead to improvements in other outcomes over the longer-term, and where impacts on violence and offending outcomes are identified these are substantial.
- There are issues with the quality of evidence that this review draws upon, which affects our confidence in the findings. Additionally, there are some types of outcomes, including violence and offending, health, and socio-emotional, that are not studied as extensively as education or employment related outcomes. These need to be studied further to fully understand the impact summer programmes have.
What is a summer programme?
Summer programmes take place in the long vacation between academic years or after the final academic year and are additional to the usual curriculum. This review centres on two types of summer programme): summer education programmes which involve educational instruction; and summer employment programmes that include a fixed-term job placement.
How might summer programmes benefit disadvantaged or ‘at risk’ young people?
Summer programmes might improve the outcomes of disadvantaged or ‘at risk’ young people by:
- offering them provision that is alternative and extra to the usual curriculum for their age and stage;
- providing them with productive activities, such as coursework or an internship;
- distracting them from unproductive activities, such as antisocial behaviour or criminal activity;
- raising their aspirations to, for example, progress to higher education;
- supporting their transition from one education stage to another; and
- teaching them new hard and soft skills.
What did we want to find out?
We wanted to understand whether summer programmes lead to improvements for disadvantaged or ‘at risk’ young people on five different types of outcome, namely education, employment, violence and offending, health and socio-emotional outcomes, and if so, how, by identifying key features of successful summer programmes that lead to these outcomes.
What did we do?
We searched for studies that examined the impact of summer programmes on the outcomes of disadvantaged young people, and other studies associated with these that examined what affected the impact the summer programme had. We also searched for the latter study type of summer programmes implemented in the UK, regardless of whether there was a study that examined the impact of the summer programme. We compared and summarised the results of the studies and rated our confidence in the evidence, based on factors such as study methods and sample sizes.
What did we find?
We found 68 studies that engaged between less than 100 to nearly 300,000 individuals in a summer programme. Forty-one of these studies estimated the impact of the summer programme on the young person’s outcomes.
We have some degree of confidence that summer education programmes appear to have had no impact on reading and mathematics test scores, although there are significant differences in this finding for mathematics test scores between the studies included. We have some degree of confidence that summer education programmes appear to have had a beneficial impact on: English and all forms of test scores (although there are significant differences in this finding for all forms of test scores between the studies included); the likelihood of completing higher education (although there are significant differences in this finding between the studies included); and STEM-related higher education outcomes.
We have some degree of confidence that summer employment programmes appear to have had no impact on: mathematics, overall, and all forms of test scores; the likelihood of having negative behavioural outcomes at school such as a suspension (although there are significant differences in this finding for mathematics test scores between the studies included); and the likelihood of progressing to, or completing higher education (although there are significant differences in this finding for mathematics test scores between the studies included). Where summer education programmes appear to have had a beneficial or detrimental impact on outcomes, due to the evidence available we cannot be certain about the finding.
What are the limitations of the evidence?
Several outcomes, including violence and offending, health and socio-emotional outcomes, are only evaluated by a small number of studies. Additionally, outcomes are generally only measured over a relatively short time period whereas data over a longer time period is needed to understand the longer-term effects of summer programmes. Lastly, some aspects of the quality of the evidence are limited: studies estimating the impact of summer programmes often suffer from individuals allocated to participate in the summer programme not taking up their place, which could affect the reliability of the estimates of impact; studies evaluating how summer programmes affect young people’s outcomes often only do so informally as part of a study estimating their impact.
How up to date is this evidence?
The evidence covers from 2012 up to the end of 2022.