Conclusions and recommendations
1. The employment gap between ethnic minorities
and the overall population is unacceptably high at 14.2%.
Despite the Department spending £40 million annually on pilot
schemes to narrow the gap, it has decreased by only 2.8% in the
last 10 years.
2. The Department's current aim to make further
progress in increasing ethnic minority employment lacks quantification
and is not sufficiently challenging. Unlike
for the period 2005-2008, the Department no longer has a specific
target to increase ethnic minority employment. Its aim remains,
however, to reduce the employment gap by 1% for each of the next
three years. This is less challenging as the Department is no
longer required to discount the impact of prevailing economic
conditions. The Department should set a more specific target,
which is both challenging and realistic and can influence how
resources are best deployed in terms of their potential to promote
ethnic minority employment.
3. Lack of continuity in the Department's
strategy to promote ethnic minority employment has reduced its
effectiveness. Between 2002 and 2006,
a series of pilot projects to increase ethnic minority employment
were trialled but not continued or rolled out nationally. It is
not clear whether the lessons from these pilots have been incorporated
into the Department's wider focus on disadvantaged groups. The
Department needs a longer term, clearly articulated strategy to
support ethnic minority employment, which is more consistently
implemented and monitored against key milestones.
4. Only seven of the fifteen City Strategy
Pathfinders have specific targets aimed at reducing ethnic minority
employment gaps. As a condition of funding,
all City Strategies for areas with significant ethnic minority
populations should include measurable targets to demonstrate their
impact in tackling the employment gap.
5. Jobcentre Plus's personal advisers do an
impressive job in helping ethnic minorities find employment, but
they need better support from Jobcentre Plus.
Despite considerable training opportunities and dissemination
of good practice, personal advisers often do not have sufficient
time or incentives to make use of these important aids to their
work. As part of its performance management process, Jobcentre
Plus should set a minimum amount of time that personal advisers
need to spend on training and accessing good practice, and reflect
this in the personal advisers' workload.
6. The scaling back of outreach activity by
Jobcentre Plus increases the risk that the hardest to reach unemployed
ethnic minorities will become more isolated.
The ending of Ethnic Minority Outreach in 2006 reduces the ability
of Jobcentre Plus to engage with economically inactive ethnic
minorities and help them get closer to the labour market. Outreach
provision should reflect the needs of the local community and
is best assessed locally. Jobcentre Plus managers should report
periodically to district managers on their outreach activities
and the extent to which they have met local needs.
7. Discrimination
remains a major barrier to employment. Jobcentre
Plus should independently assess ethnic minority awareness of
its procedures for reporting suspected cases of discrimination.
The Department should also explore the possibility of encouraging
employers to obtain a recognised `Kitemark' certifying that they
are an equal opportunities employer.
8. The quality of some New Deal training needs
to improve, in particular, English language teaching for Speakers
of Other Languages. Despite the need for
high quality English language training, Jobcentre Plus has not
addressed the shortcomings it has identified in the quality of
training provided. The Department needs to satisfy itself that
all its contracts with English language training providers specify
appropriate teaching standards and that, where these are not met,
penalties are imposed. The Department should set out the results
of this review and the overall quality of teaching achieved in
its Annual Report.
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