Working Together - for Employment and Inclusion in Edinburgh
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Edinburgh has an employment problem with a difference. Job opportunities exist, but people who could be taking advantage of them can’t do so because of the barriers they face, many of them caused by the way services are structured.
Partnership working between the organisations involved in employment access in Edinburgh is seen as the best way to overcome these barriers. Joined Up For Jobs is the strategy that’s bringing these organisations together.
Working Together for Employment and Inclusion in Edinburgh was an initiative that took Joined Up For Jobs one step further. It did so by developing and strengthening the partnership, reviewing and updating the strategy and making sure it was in line with national and European policy. It strengthened partners’ effectiveness and their ability to better meet the needs of the city’s economy.
Supported by the European Social Fund’s Article 6 Innovative Measures funding, Working Together was guided by the three key objectives of the European Employment Strategy:
• full employment
• quality and productivity
• cohesion and social inclusion
Working Together supported practical initiatives to test how to make the process joined-up and gave policy makers a better understanding of grassroots issues. For example, one project saw Information Technology systems developed to improve interagency working and tracking of clients.
The Working Together project was intended to make the local connections between four pillars of strategy - employability, entrepreneurship, equal opportunities and adaptability. It also wanted to find ways of making Edinburgh’s Joined Up For Jobs strategy more effective, around its three principles:
A baseline study of the strategy was completed by Napier University's Employment Research Institute. Capital City Partnership, the lead partner in Joined Up For Jobs, published a consultation paper on future options for the strategy based on findings of this study and other reports. (The Strategy and Policy Options, the Working Together for Employment and Inclusion in Edinburgh: A Baseline Study Full Report and the Executive Summary are available by clicking on each of the preceding document titles.) A number of the recommendations from both of these projects are set out below.
The key partners reviewed Joined Up For Jobs and re-affirmed that it will continue to be their joint framework and strategy. The emerging consensus was, however, to keep its specific focus on access to work, while making the right links to other policy areas - such as skills and lifelong learning, entrepreneurship, education, health, childcare and literacy and numeracy.
Looking at the 22 recommendations made by the Baseline Study, quite a few were about expanding on areas of work which had been started already. The challenge was deciding priorities for action and finding resources. The partners sought to prioritise the following 'bottlenecks':
- Mainstreaming employability to other policy areas - eg health, Further Education
- Ensuring stability and development of the employment academy approach
- Aligning funding for intermediaries to ensure they can implement the Joined Up For Jobs approach
- Developing joint working arrangements between Jobcentre Plus advisers and intermediaries
- Creating reliable referral routes from frontline services (eg health) for the target groups
- Establishing a robust Joined Up For Jobs monitoring and evaluation plan
- Implementing ICT policy to support joined-up working and strategic management
- Improving support for workers and employers after recruitment.
New areas of activity?
There were also proposals for new initiatives. For these it was necessary to first achieve agreement in principle, then decide priorities and who would take new activities forward. Proposals received included the following:
- Developing more consistent approaches to provision eg regarding childcare, basic skills assessment, better-off calculations
- More provision of work experience, supported employment
- A more strategic approach to funding, to tackle gaps and respond to ESF changes
- More focus on reaching the most disadvantaged jobseekers - eg a lead agency in each target sector, developing the key worker role, mentoring
- Building capacity of organisations and the network - eg trade association approach, shared staff development, more feedback opportunities
- Extending the geographical reach of the strategy beyond the city and to target smaller areas.
Further information is available in the Document Library and throughout this website.
Working Together for Employment and Inclusion Conference - Presentation Papers
Papers detailing the presentations given at the Working Together conference, which was held in Edinburgh on 10th and 11th November 2005, are available in the Document Library. The conference presented European, UK and Scottish policies and showcased initiatives in Edinburgh which are relevant to their implementation.
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