Scottish Government

PART I: INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

This report presents an evaluation of Phase 1 (April 2004 to March 2006) of the Working for Families Fund ( WFF), carried out by the Employment Research Institute, Napier University for the Scottish Executive. WFF was established to invest in new initiatives to improve the employability of parents who have difficulties in participating in the labour market, specifically in employment, education or training. The Fund supported these parents through helping them find sustainable childcare solutions and through providing or accessing other relevant employability-related services. In rural areas, barriers created by poor transport, limited services and the lack of a critical mass of clients were also particularly important.

WFF contributes to the Scottish Executive's 'Closing the Opportunity Gap' approach to tackling poverty and disadvantage, by improving rates of employment and economic activity, and to its commitment to eradicating child poverty within a generation.

1.1 WHAT IS THE WORKING FOR FAMILIES FUND?

From the start of WFF (Phase 1) it was recognised that clients needed support in terms of both sustainable childcare solutions and the provision and access to other relevant employability-related services. While initially WFF focused particularly on helping to remove childcare barriers, a holistic employability service approach developed to provide continuous support to help parents towards, into and after employment, education or training.

The WFF programme focuses on disadvantaged parents, specifically:

• lone parents (who are pre-New Deal);
• parents who are on low incomes;
• disadvantaged parents with other stresses in the household that make it difficult to access and sustain employment, education or training, including disability, mental health and substance abuse problems.

The main support provided by WFF is based around 'Key Workers,' ⁸ who support clients who wish to move into work, education or training through:

• helping them to improve their employability; and
• addressing childcare and other practical barriers standing in their way.

Clients are helped to improve their employability by establishing goals and producing a personal action plan that links them to the various types of employability support available locally. These may include: personal development courses to boost confidence and self-esteem; education and training to improve skills and qualifications; careers advice; money advice; and work experience - all helping the client to progress towards or into work. A second key element of WFF support is helping clients to identify and access the childcare they need at each stage. Often this takes the form of information and advice, linking them to an existing childcare place, but it may also involve financial assistance ( e.g. paying one-off, 'upfront' nursery registration fees, or paying for childcare while a parent attends education or training, or paying for childcare for a short time until tax credits come through).

WFF was designed to complement, not duplicate or replace, existing services and to work with local childcare partnerships and employment and employability focused partnerships to fill gaps in provision for the WFF client groups. In some areas this has meant developing employability related services, including short pre-vocational training, or helping clients to obtain driving licences, while elsewhere it has involved setting up additional, often more flexible, childcare services e.g. childminding and sitter services.

Support from WFF has centred around three key stages:

• Pre-employment - supporting parents to improve their basic employability skills, confidence and attitudes;
• At Transition points - helping parents to make the Transition into employment, education, substantial training or volunteering;
• Post-employment - support to sustain employment, for instance through a period of crisis such as a childcare problem. This has been offered both to parents who engaged with WFF at the pre-employment stage and have successful moved into employment, and to parents who were already in work when they first approached WFF.

WFF has its origins in a small pilot in Glasgow and Dumfries and Galloway in 2003-04 which explored ways of addressing childcare barriers to employment. A key finding of the pilot was that a programme of this sort should provide parents with one-to-one mentoring and support to address the range of barriers clients experienced, as well as addressing childcare needs. When the subsequent WFF programme was established, ten local authorities (including the pilot authorities) were awarded funding for 2004-06 (Phase 1), developing services and projects building upon the key lessons from the pilot stage. The budget was £10 million pa (£20m in total) allocated as below (although actual spending was around £12.4 million, see Section 6):

Budget allocations were based largely on the number and proportion of children living in households dependent on key benefits (Income Support and Income Based Jobseekers Allowance), while the incidences of multiple deprivation and rurality were also taken into account.Phase 2 extended WFF for another two years (2006-08) adding another ten local authorities (so totalling 20 rural and urban local authorities) and is the subject of a further on-going evaluation. Overall £50m of funding was made available for WFF in Phases 1 and 2 (2004-08). WFF has an overall target for the two Phases combined of increasing by 15,000, by March 2008, the number of parents from disadvantaged areas and groups entering or moving towards employment, by removing childcare barriers. Because WFF Phase 1 (2004-06) was largely exploratory, specific outcome targets for this period were deemed inappropriate.

This main report only considers activity in Phase 1 (2004-06) focusing on the key aspects of the fund, the clients involved, the outcomes, and conclusions and recommendations. A series of Technical Annexes provides further detailed information.

1.2 STRUCTURE OF THE REPORT

The report is in four main Parts, starting with this ' Introduction'. In the remainder of Part I, section 2 briefly reviews Literature and Policies that are relevant to the WFF policy and client groups. Section 3 provides an outline of the social and economic Context in each of the WFF local authority areas.

Part II, 'What Happened', presents details of who the WFF clients were, what happened to them (their outcomes), and the overall impact of WFF over the two years to 31 March 2006.

Specifically, section 4 outlines Client Data, providing the overall descriptive statistics on the registered 5808 WFF clients. Section 5, Outcomes and Analysis, examines their outcomes, in terms of both 'hard' outcomes (such as whether they went into employment, education, training) and 'soft' outcomes (such as increased confidence or other movement towards entering employment, education or training). This section also analyses the links between different characteristics of clients and their outcomes. Section 6, Cost-Benefit Analysis, considers the costs of WFF and potential impacts on public funding.

Part III, 'Implementation', considers the development and implementation of WFF.

Section 7, Development and Operation of WFF in Local Authorities, specifically deals with the local authority management structures, and the development of WFF. The WFF (Phase 1) programme has been an innovative and flexible fund and as such, learning from experience and practice during the course of Phase 1 has been an important part of the process, and is briefly discussed in this section.

In section 8, a selection of Project Case Studies provide qualitative information on WFF projects in order to gather qualitative information to complement the statistical data on clients provided in Part II. The case studies also aimed to explain the range of WFF projects and to learn from their experiences in order to unpack specific issues and draw out more general lessons concerning implementation and operations of WFF projects. The projects were based around four general categories: Key Workers; Issues ( e.g. transport); Client Groups ( e.g. Lone parents); and Childcare. This outlines the key learning to date, in particular lessons that may be of use to others introducing similar programmes.

Part IV, section 10, sets out the main Conclusions and Recommendations of the evaluation.

Further details containing more detailed information, including methods used, can be found in a series of Technical Annexes.