Step-by-step assessment of youth support as part of the youth engagement contract

The Youth Engagement Contract (CEJ) is a support and professional integration scheme aimed at young people between the ages of 16 and 25 who are neither in training, nor in employment, nor in studies (known as NEETs). This scheme has been deployed since 1^st March 2022 by the 900 local employment centre agencies and by the 440 local employment missions, and replaces the Youth Guarantee. The Minister for Labour, Full Employment and Inclusion commissioned Igas to conduct a “step-by-step assessment of the scheme, one year after its launch”. Among the main subjects to be examined, the letter of engagement mentions in particular the reliability of the indicators, the quality and relevance of the service offer and questions relating to certification.

Conducting an assessment of a scheme during its first year of implementation is not straightforward and it is above all the deployment conditions that are then analysed rather than the effectiveness of the scheme, which is in principle still uncertain. To carry out its work, the mission relied on the available dashboards, data extracted from information systems, interviews with national managers, field trips in six regions and in-depth interviews in a seventh region, but also on ad hoc surveys that it carried out with directors and advisors of employment agencies and local missions. Appendix 1 specifies the methodological elements and presents all the results of the two surveys conducted with the advisors. This rather extensive investigation work, carried out with the support of both networks and after case reviews conducted with randomly selected advisors, has made it possible to considerably enrich the diagnosis made and to improve the understanding of the dashboards.