PERU were partially funded by the Ministry of Justice to undertake a Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) to assess the outcomes of community and custody delivered vocational training and employment programmes on reoffending. Vocational training included vocational education and work placements while employment programmes included ‘work readiness’ and ‘job readiness’ courses.

What is the need?

Previous systematic reviews on this topic have not focused particularly on the UK context. A key difference between this REA and those previously undertaken is that we included recently published UK evidence – principally relevant studies published by the Ministry of Justice’s Justice Data Lab. We conducted the REA between February and July 2020 and have produced a report for the Ministry of Justice will includes a narrative synthesis of 46 studies, and a meta-analysis of a subset of these (33 studies). We have written a summary of our report with headline findings for the Reducing Reoffending website.

Project links