Long-Term Evaluation of Hjørring Municipality’s Youth Guarantee
During their final years of compulsory schooling, young people must make choices regarding their future educational trajectory. This project evaluates and investigates the implementation and effect of Hjørring Municipality’s Youth Guarantee initiative which aims to enhance young people’s awareness of their personal “positive destination”. Implementing a thorough strategy for aiding pupils in making educational and future choices, the Youth Guarantee guarantees pupils help regarding support and guidance across the school, the municipal bureaucracy, and local companies. In Hjørring Municipality, the Municipal Council passed the new strategy in 2019, where the ‘Youth Guarantee’ is a central effort. The effort contains four overarching tracks, namely the compulsory school (‘grundskolen’), the companies, the guidance counselling efforts, and the overarching support for adolescents. Hjørring Municipality has solicited Centre for Education Policy Research in conducting the primary evaluation of the Youth Guarantee. The project therefore follows Hjørring Municipality’s Youth Guarantee from 2020 to 2031.
Scientifically, the project is preoccupied with exploring young people’s school life, motivation for education and choices regarding education and careers, including hopes and dreams for their individual future. Furthermore, the project explores the Hjørring Municipality Youth Guarantee as a case of how local education policy development entails policy borrowing from other contexts (Friche, Enemark & Ydesen, 2021), but also how different actors influence young people’s education choices – and how prolonged internships as an initiative in the Youth Guarantee potentially can mitigate lack of well-being and motivation.
Research team
The evaluation and subsequent research are led by Postdoc Nanna Ramsing Enemark under scientific guidance by Professor Mette Buchardt. Research Assistant Lea Høxbroe Højbjerg is employed on the project, and alongside Enemark develops the annual reports on the evaluation and conducts research associated with the project.
Spanning until 2031, this long-term evaluation is concerned with exploring all relevant actors in the Youth Guarantee (the bureaucracy, the companies, the pupils, their parents, and the school actors). The project is furthermore affiliated with scholars from other departments and faculties at Aalborg University in interdisciplinary efforts related to the evaluation.