Reforming Scottish skills and employability services to support growth
• Devolve Jobcentres to Scottish regions: Power over the Jobcentre network should be passed to groupings of local authorities. Their operational philosophy can then better align with the Scottish approach to employability support, and connect to other regional skills provision and needs.
• Enquiry into No One Left Behind performance: Our analysis has raised red flags regarding disparities in outcomes on NOLB. The current data does not allow a direct comparison between No One Left Behind and its predecessor, let alone schemes elsewhere in the UK and abroad. The Scottish Government should launch in investigation into the performance of No One Left Behind, the disparities revealed in this report, and understand what may be driving it.
• Greater transparency, sharing and stability of funding for NOLB: Holyrood should track the share of spending supporting third sector organisations and encourage LA to use at least 20% of funding in this way to ensure diversity of services. Funding for providers needs to be multi-year to enable investment.
• Expand Individual Placement and Support to 5,000+ places a year: Scotland should do more to offer IPS, as England is, and as Our Scottish Future recommended in From Growth to Good. Scaling England’s ambitions down to Scotland’s population, around 4,500-5,000 IPS places would be offered a year. That would be c150 per local authority. IPS may be delivered most effectively through partnerships between multiple local authorities, or combined authorities, to benefit from scale, especially where neighbouring LAs are commutable, as in the central belt.
• Introduce a ‘Scottish Service Year’: Programmes like the cancelled Community Jobs Scotland can combine social impact with employability benefits, as seen in the UK Year of Service pilot, which reduced the NEET rate from over 50% to under 20%. A Scottish Service Year would follow that model, giving 9-12 month paid placements in anything from home insulation to healthcare, with participants brought together to network and receive training.
• Introduce a ‘Seniors for Scotland’ scheme: The AmeriCorps Senior programme gives 140,000 older Americans the chance to contribute to their communities each year, whilst keeping them healthy and reducing loneliness. A Seniors for Scotland programme would do the same, enabling older people to contribute their skills and experience to reinforce public services. Some of the placements identified for the Scottish Service Year would be appropriate for those looking for a late career change, and could be offered on the same terms to those aged 55+. There would be an additional voluntary placement strand, as with AmeriCorps, managed through shared procurement between local authorities.