Short Abstract

This session shares early insights from the Refugee Employability Programme evaluation, showing how evidence is driving adaptive delivery and policy learning to improve refugee integration outcomes.

Description

Background and aims

The Refugee Employability Programme (REP) was a major Home Office initiative supporting refugees in England to integrate and progress towards sustainable employment. The independent evaluation, led by Ipsos UK with RAND Europe and Renaisi, examined how programme design, local partnerships, and delivery models influenced employability and integration outcomes. This session shares interim findings and explores how evaluation evidence informed real-time programme learning and policy adaptation.

Methods and approach

Using a mixed-methods, theory-based and quasi-experimental designs (QED), the evaluation combines process and impact analysis, fieldwork across multiple regions, and monitoring data review. Interviews with delivery partners, local authorities, and refugees illuminate variations in delivery, coordination mechanisms, and contextual challenges. To estimate programme impacts, the evaluation applies a QED using HMRC administrative data. This approach enables the assessment of employment entry and progression patterns over time, providing credible counterfactual evidence on the programme’s contribution to labour-market integration.

Key findings and insights

Early findings highlight that strong partnerships, co-location of employability and integration services, and flexible employer engagement underpin success. Data-sharing barriers and regional labour market differences create challenges. The evaluation demonstrates how participatory, data-informed learning loops can support adaptive implementation and continuous improvement.

Conclusions and implications / potential for impact

This evaluation has the potential to generate actionable insights that will support the development of future refugee employment programmes. By triangulating multi-region implementation findings with robust QED evidence on employment outcomes, the study can identify which delivery models, partnership arrangements and support components are most effective in enabling sustained labour-market integration. It also has the potential to illuminate system-level barriers - such as coordination challenges, caseload pressures and access to wider services - that shape programme performance, thereby providing a stronger evidence base for enhancing delivery coherence and operational resilience. In doing so, the evaluation can inform future policy decisions on scaling, targeting and commissioning, ensuring that forthcoming programmes build on what works and are better equipped to address the structural and contextual challenges faced by refugees entering the UK labour market. This session will feature partners’ reflections on how evidence informed the REP’s delivery and broader policy on refugee employability. It offers practical insights into bridging evaluation and action within complex, multi-stakeholder programmes.