Last year, we announced that we had generated £98 million in social value since 2022. In our latest and most rigorous measurement of impact, our partners have generated £325M social value in 2025 alone. This is the impact their programmes create for young people, and for society as a whole.
This is the result of a partnership with Social Value Portal, who expanded upon our previous measurement with GIST Impact, expanding our methodology across six brand new social value blocks.
The scale of the problem
When we released our latest number, 957,000 young people in the UK were classified as NEET (not in education, employment or training). Since then, the Department of Work and Pensions released a review which found this number to now be over 1 million, the highest in years.
Youth unemployment sits at 16%, nearly double the adult rate. And entry-level roles requiring a degree have fallen by two-thirds since AI tools entered the workplace.
As well as all this, fewer than one in five young people gain access to meaningful work experience before leaving education.
Young people aren’t lacking ambition, they have that in abundance. What they need is more access to opportunities and more information on what’s available to them.
Why is access so unequal?
- Geographical constraints: Students in rural or remote areas have limited access to local employers offering placements.
- Financial barriers: The costs associated with travel, accommodation and even professional attire and equipment are prohibitive for those from lower-income families.
- Limited employer engagement: Many employers are unable or unwilling to offer work experience placements due to resource constraints, capacity limitations or simply a lack of awareness of the benefits.
- Discriminatory practices: Unconscious bias and informal networks mean that in-person work experience is disproportionately accessed through personal or family connections.
Virtual Work Experience (VWEX) doesn't remove every barrier, nor is it a complete replacement for in-person work experience. When done well, in-person placements are valuable, but are often inaccessible for most young people.
Virtual Work Experience is able to remove some of the constraints we listed above, like location, cost, limited employer engagement, and significantly reduces discriminatory practices.
Six blocks of social value
Our last framework with GIST Impact was built to measure one particular outcome. It measured the employment benefit to young people who complete a Springpod programme.
A great starting point, but there’s more to just employment benefits after completing a Virtual Work Experience with us. Our latest methodology introduces six new blocks of social value, each representing a genuine outcome for young people and society as a whole.
- Widen Social Inclusion – How can equal access to opportunity create a true sense of belonging?
- Reduce Anxiety – What impact does career confidence have on mental health?
- Build Soft Skills – How do real-world experiences bridge the gap between learning and industry expectations?
- Reduce Crime – How does meaningful opportunity affect social participation?
- Improve Future Outcomes – What is the long-term value of early career exposure on financial futures?
- Lower Health Costs – How can early intervention improve lifelong health and wellbeing?
These blocks are grounded in peer-reviewed research and government datasets, and bring the total social value per learner to £1,467.
The explanation of each block as well as our full methodology can be found in our whitepaper, which you can download here.
From virtual experience to real employment
The numbers are one thing, but the goal is ensuring every young person has the access and opportunity they deserve.
Between September 2024 and August 2025, the JLR Virtual Work Experience programme on Springpod reached 5,093 young people across and generated £1,856,826 in social value.
22% were eligible for free school meals, 5% were care-experienced, 6% had SEND, and 22% were first-generation university hopefuls.
The destination data shows that 30% of programme participants are now working in engineering-related roles, and a further 41% have gone on to study engineering-related courses.
Kareena, a Year 12 student from the West Midlands, said the programme “[gave] me hope in what career I want, it has helped my personal growth and made me focus deeply into what I want for the future.”
That’s just the impact from one of our partners. Of the learners who completed Amazon’s Virtual Work Experience programme and have since left school, nearly 1 in 3 are now in a technology-aligned role or course.
More than 6,000 students who completed a Barclays programme are now on track to enter a financial services career.
To explore the full list of our partners and the social value they’ve created, you can click here.
What comes next
We’re proud to be able to share our latest and most thorough measure of impact, but there’s still more to be done.
With over a million young people NEET and work experience still dependent on location, connections and circumstances, access for young people is not being treated like the right it should be.
The £325 million generated in 2025 is our biggest year yet, but we remain committed to updating our methodology year-on-year, so it’s constantly at its most accurate.
There’s more we want to measure as well, including programme-specific modelling, deeper longitudinal tracking of where young people actually end up, and a theory of change that makes every one of our assumptions traceable back to evidence.
We also want to start measuring something we haven't captured yet, like the value of a young person finding out early that a career isn't for them, which can be just as valuable as finding the one that is.
None of this would be possible without all of our partners, their programmes and the young people who have chosen to explore their future with Springpod.
Want more of the data?
The whitepaper includes a breakdown of the methodology, the six value blocks, partner-level impact and destination data.
