Written evidence submitted
by Manchester City Council
Manchester City Council is a partner in the Greater
Manchester FJF Programme which aims to create and fill 8,000 jobs
between September 2009 and March 2011. In Manchester, we are committed
to creating and filling 1,500 of those posts and to date we have
created and filled 916. Our response to this consultation is based
on our experience of delivering FJF placements and our wider experience
of developing approaches to entrenched worklessness in some of
our neighbourhoods.
THE EXTENT
TO WHICH
THE FJF HAS
SUCCEEDED IN
MATCHING NEW
WORK EXPERIENCE
OPPORTUNITIES TO
YOUNG UNEMPLOYED
PEOPLE
FJF in Manchester has proved very successful in matching
employment opportunities to young unemployed people, targeting
some of the most difficult to help in our community, and for whom
working is not the norm. We have achieved this by:
- Mobilising key partners to provide FJF placements
& progression opportunities for young people.
- Pioneering new recruitment methods avoiding the
traditional CV & application form process. The focus is on
the young person's potential rather than academic achievements
or previous experience and is particularly important when placing
vulnerable groups e.g. young offenders.
- Providing an enhanced induction and direct personal
support to young people during their first few weeks of work to
deal with any barriers they might have to sustaining employment
e.g. conflict between work hours and caring responsibilities.
- Identifying a number of employment opportunities
for young people who come through the FJF route e.g. ring-fencing
MCC entry level positions for young people completing their six
months on FJF and recommending particular young people whom we
have "talent spotted" through the process to other employers.
- Making young people aware of all of their progression
routes (further education, apprenticeships, ring-fenced vacancies
and volunteering) with a single point of contact for each, as
they come to the end of their placement.
STRENGTHS AND
WEAKNESSES OF
THE FJF PROGRAMME
FROM THE
PERSPECTIVE OF
PROVIDERS, EMPLOYERS
AND YOUNG
UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE
AND PARTICULARLY
IN RELATION
TO THE
LONG-TERM
SUSTAINABILITY OF
EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES.
Strengths
The key strength of the Future Jobs Fund is that
the programme design and delivery was devolved to a local level
and by developing it at a Greater Manchester level we were able
to link it with a natural economic boundary and travel to work
patterns in the conurbation. This enabled us to design a flexible
programme which we could enhance and vary to meet the needs of
individuals as we learned lessons from its delivery. Crucially
we were able to wrap other public services around the needs of
the individual and family to improve their prospects for success.
Equally we were able to work with local partners e.g. Manchester
College to ensure that young people leaving FJF could secure an
appropriate learning opportunity when their placement was completed
rather than waiting for the start of a new course /term.
Secondly we have recognised that FJF opportunities
can act as a "proxy intermediate labour market" where
young people can make the transition to work in a relatively safe
but real work environment. We have provided an enhanced induction
and personalised support to deal with any particular barriers
that a young person might face in their early weeks at work. Overall,
the training and personal development programme for FJF candidates
looks to build generic, transferable skills that a young person
can take into the wider labour market and the experience they
gain on a FJF placement should make them more competitive in the
labour market and better able to sustain employment in the long-term.
The scale of the FJF programme and the long-established
partnerships that we have in the City around the work and skills
agenda, meant that we were able to offer a diverse range of real
jobs and target to communities that have felt in the past that
work is not an option. Once young people have engaged in the programme
we have been able to identify with and deal with other barriers
to employment e.g. poor literacy and numeracy levels. The AGMA
model of 35 hours paid employment as opposed to the national standard
of 25 hours per week, which equates to £54 additional income
per person, has made the jobs more attractive and means there
is more money circulating in our most deprived neighbourhoods.
Over and above the benefits to the individuals involved
there have been long-term benefits to our local communities. One
example is the Zion Arts Centre, which is a community based creative
and media organisation that works with young people in Manchester.
They provided a number of FJF opportunities and supported the
FJF young people to establish a youth theatre that will provide
a legacy beyond the FJF programme. One of the FJF candidates progressed
on to a creative apprenticeship with the Zion upon completion
of their FJF placement. There are many other examples across the
City with two of the City's cemeteries recently achieving Green
Flag status thanks to the hard work and dedication of FJF employees.
Weaknesses
The most significant weakness with the current FJF
programme is that private sector employers have not been able
to take on Future Jobs Fund candidates. The private sector represents
the best opportunity for progression routes to permanent employment
and is even more critical in an environment of spending cuts and
a reduction of jobs in the public sector. Our approach to "talent
spotting" as part of the FJF programme and other initiatives
that we have developed with partner organisations and large employers,
such as Aspire an employment agency that recruits workless residents
into temporary employment, have demonstrated that temporary employment
with the right support is a sustainable route to permanent employment.
These are they type of local approaches that we would wish to
see incorporated into the Work Programme.
As FJF was a volume programme that was designed
and delivered within a short timescale, the "carrot"
and "stick" aspects of the programme were not as balanced
as they could have been. There can often be a time delay between
a young person disengaging from the programme and benefit sanctions.
Our experience suggests that a short, sharp shock in terms of
sanctions would have a more immediate effect on the behaviour
/engagement of the young people involved.
Tracking of young people and sharing of personal
data between agencies has, as with other programmes, been a barrier.
This results in incomplete data about the destination of young
people and a significant investment of time by the delivering
agent in trying to track young people who have left the programme.
Tracking and data sharing issues are particularly pertinent to
this programme as young people can often be transient.
There have been issues with progression routes because
of eligibility requirements of other programmes e.g. SFA funded
programmes where you have to have been unemployed for six months
or more to be eligible. Because of our partnership working arrangements
and our ability to be flexible locally we have found local solutions
to some of these problems but it has been time consuming.
Retention - our experience has shown that people
moving into work for the first time, or after a long time out
of work, require much more intensive support, both before starting
work and whilst in work, than had been previously assumed. Whilst
Manchester's drop-out rate on FJF has been low (less than 5%),
there is a spike at seven weeks. Reasons given include the new
lifestyle proving too difficult or stressful, or people's hitherto
good experience in their new job marred by a small disciplinary
issue, or externalities such as caring responsibilities. A lack
of local knowledge and or wider family / community experience
of how to cope with such difficulties can lead to dropping out
of employment. We have found that enhanced induction at the start
of the process has to be followed up with help to develop emotional
and practical resilience, as well as technical and educational
job and skills based support
THE LIKELY
IMPACT OF
THE DECISION
TO END
FJF IN MARCH
2011 RATHER THAN
MARCH 2012
The most immediate impact is likely to be an increase
in youth unemployment or in a best case scenario a reduction in
the recent decreases in youth unemployment, which we have seen
since the introduction of FJF. In a City like Manchester where
we have over 64,000 people of working age out of work, concentrated
in our poorest communities, the impact of ending FJF earlier will
be felt disproportionately in those communities.
Continuing the FJF programme to March 2012 would
mean that there would be an overlap with the introduction and
embedding of the Work Programme provision. This would provide
the potential for the FJF programme or parts of it to become part
of the Work Programme supply chain. It would also enable us to
further develop our pathways from FJF into employment opportunities
with the private sector which again could be built on by Work
Programme contractors. The decision to end FJF in March 2011 means
that there will be a significant gap between the ending of this
programme and commencement of the Work Programme.
The FJF programme adds value locally where projects
are developed that are used / enjoyed by the local community e.g.
the restoration of the Victorian Kitchen Garden in Wythenshawe
Park. These tend to be visible and contribute to pride of place.
One of the progression routes for FJF employees is structured
volunteering. It is as yet too early to determine whether the
experience of our young people on FJF means that they are more
likely to volunteer /be actively engaged in their local communities.
HOW THE
TRANSITION FROM
FJF TO THE
WORK PROGRAMME
WILL BE
MANAGED, INCLUDING
THE PART
TO BE
PLAYED BY
THE GOVERNMENT'S
PROPOSAL TO
FUND NEW
APPRENTICESHIPS.
Manchester has a fairly unique set of economic opportunities,
alongside some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country. As
a City Council, we want to maximize long-term sustainable economic
growth and ensure that our residents are best able to benefit
from that growth by ensuring that they have the skills to actively
participate in our economy. At its heart, this policy will address,
and break, the cycle of long-term benefit dependency experienced
by many of our residents, and help them play a more productive
role as active citizens. But to be effective, welfare reform and
the Work Programme must be developed in an integrated way with
local services and opportunities so that the right support is
in place to address the range of barriers that people face along
the pathway to employment.
Stronger recognition needs to be given to the role
Local Authorities and partners at a local level can play in the
development and delivery of the Work Programme. Our models for
intervention as demonstrated with our experience of the FJF show
that the best results are delivered when employment and skills
support is delivered to individuals with other services wrapped
around to meet individual and community need. This approach takes
a holistic approach across all public services to enable and support
people into work and off benefit dependency.
We support the Government's commitment to localism
and ask therefore that local flexibility is built into the delivery
of the Work Programme. We need to ensure that the prime contractors
for the Work Programme work in an integrated way with other local
partners and service providers, thus giving the best chance of
creating sustainable work opportunities for the residents of Manchester.
We should not though overlook that in a significant minority of
cases, a "flagship" programme - focussed on pre-employment
support and with some of the principles of FJF embedded within
it can play an invaluable part in galvanising the commitment of
employers. Demonstrating real success enabling those "hardest
to help" back into work can have a catalytic effect in our
communities.
8 October 2010
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