121220 Fr Council Re 2011-12 Annual Report

7/30/2019 121220 Fr Council Re 2011-12 Annual Report

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Ms Kezia Dugdale MSP

M1.07The Scottish Parliament

Edinburgh

EH991SP

Dear Ms Dugdale

Date 20 December 2012

Your Ref

Our Ref

Thank you for your kind recognition of the achievements set out in Council's

Employability & Skills Annual report for 2011/12.

The report aims to clearly articulate our impact on reducing unemployment as part of our

Economic Strategy (A Strategy for Jobs), so positive comments and queries on our workare always welcome.

Q. Would you be able to tell me the outcomes for those who did not begin training?

Capital Skills delivers the vocational element of our integrated skills pipeline primarily

targeting the construction and horticulture sectors, although it does service other sectorswhere there is demonstrable demand.

This work is partly funded through a "Get Ready for Work! Training for Work" contract

held with Skills Development Scotland (SDS) and is therefore subject to their contractual

obligations and operational requirements in relation to programme components, referrals

and client attendance.

Capital Skills operates a rolling recruitment programme but is limited by the number of

training weeks within the SDS contract and also by operational capacity.

In 2011/2012 the difference between referral and starts was the result of someindividuals referred for interview not being ready to take up a training place (23% of

referred clients). In addition, 38% of the individuals referred did not attend as agreed.

We provide feedback directly to SDS on all referrals.

Our / ...

City Development

Economic Development, Level G/1, Waverley Court,

4 East Market Street, Edinburgh E HB B SG

Tel 01315294625 Fax 01315296205

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Our aim is to maximise the number of individuals who can benefit from our service and

critically to secure a positive outcome so we will work with SOS to offer alternatives tothose who are unsuccessful.

~ur ~utco~es a~e generally high, but flattening demand has impacted on our ability toIdentify sUitable Job opportunities on completion of training. We are building Community

Benefits agreements into contracts and working closely with Business Gateway to

strengthen our links to employers to generate additional opportunities.

The contractual obligation of our contract with SOS is that we must dismiss anyone who

exceeds five days of unauthorised absence. This accounted for 26 individuals accepted

to the programme who did not secure a positive outcome in 2011/12.

What impact do Edinburgh City Council and the 'Get On' programme foresee from

these unfortunate developments?

We work with Remploy on their employability service rather than their factory business so

the closure of the Edinburgh factory has had minimal impact on our work with them. We

have started to review Council funded services targeted at disabled jobseekers to ensure

that our service targets gaps and bottlenecks in this area and reflects the significant

changes in national Welfare to Work provision.

Furthermore, can you describe to me your processes for ensuring that the same

young people are not taking multiple short-term programmes with no lasting

benefit?

We recognise the need to focus on the sustainability of outcomes and believe this will beachieved through an evidenced base approach, building trust and credibility with both

jobseekers and employers. For this reason we put considerable effort into understanding

the needs of business and ensuring we equip individuals with the right skills to enablethem to secure work on merit. Our experience is that this also helps their confidence and

future career prospects.

Specifically on sustainability we have rolled out a web based client management system

(Caselink) across our funded provision. This will enable us to examine individual case

- -- histories, monitor the success of our interventions, identify-thingswhich are not working

and recognise the value of the interaction between services.

Can you clarify whether you counted activity agreements as a positive destination

for the purposes of this report? If not, why not?

We do treat Activity Agreements as a positive destination and they are an integral part of

our skills pipeline, but they are not included in this report as they are led by our

colleagues in Children and Families. Activity Agreements only became available inEdinburgh in 2011/12. If they had been included in the report this would have accounted

for an additional 99 young people.

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I hope this answered your questions, but should you wish to clarify anything please

contact Ken Shaw, Service Manager (Employability & Skills) on 0131 5293476 or

[email protected].

Yours sincerely

G~~

Head of Economic Development

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mailto:[email protected]:[email protected].


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121220 Fr Council Re 2011-12 Annual Report

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