Improving employability in the North East

1
Improving employability in the North East

• Alistair Grimes
• Rocket Science
• March 2006

2
Current Context

• This is a good time to be thinking about
  employability because of
• Welfare to Work Agenda and the DWP Green Paper
• Northern Way (employment and productivity gaps)
• State of the cities review.

3
Why employability framework is important

• Labour market and meeting the needs of employers
• Getting the funding and resources in the right
  place and for the right things
• Getting the right supply chain in place across
  the region.

4
What we were asked to do

• Stage 1
• Map current expenditure by funder and across the
  region
• Map current provision by area and by client
  group(s)
• Create a benchmark for current performance

5
What we were asked to do

• Stage 2
• Agree on what areas of the supply chain need to
  be improved in order to meet employer needs
• Redesign infrastructure to deliver this
• Look at how funding can support this
• Put in place programme to support delivery agents
  and those purchasing services.

6
Where are we in this process?

• Stage 1
• Information has been requested from funders and
  delivery agents (April 3rd)
• Assessment tool has been created and will be
  explained to delivery agents (27th/28th March)
• Discussions with Employer Coalition and other
  stakeholders
• First stage report early May.

7
What we found out in Scotland

• Over 515 million spent on employability
  services
• Services fragmented and performance variable
• Overspend on training/skills, not enough spent on
  engagement and retention in the labour market
• In Glasgow over 320 separate employability
  projects.

8
What we found out in Scotland

• Funds often support inputs and not employment
  results
• Interventions were not at labour market level
• Lack of common assessment
• Issue of NEET Group.

9
Action in Scotland

• Workforce Plus Agenda
• 7 Closing the opportunity gap area programmes (8
  million)
• Bringing together of agencies in Glasgow (local
  authority, enterprise network, JC, Health Board)
• DWP Pilots
• Employability Unit in the Executive

10
Improving Employability in the North East

• Alistair Grimes
• Rocket Science
• March 2006

11
Delivering Improved Performance in Employability

• Alistair Grimes
• Rocket Science
• March 2006

12
Delivering Improved Performance in Employability

• North East suffers from lower levels of
  productivity and lower employment rates than rest
  of UK
• The Employability framework plans to help tackle
  the second issue directly

13
Delivering Improved Performance in Employability

• Starting point is understanding employer needs
  and obstacles to meeting those needs
• Next point is identifying gaps in the current
  supply chain of provision
• Final point is to improve the performance of
  providers and to align funds to better
  performance.

14
Timetable

• Stage 1 mapping funds, provision and
  performance by mid-April
• Stage 2 designing ways to improve provision and
  performance by summer.