Employability – What Can We Learn from EQUAL?
24th January 2008
This event focussed on the lessons from the three EQUAL Employability Partnerships in Scotland. The event aimed to:
• encourage learning from the experience of the EQUAL Employability Partnerships
• identify how this learning could be applied in other areas.
“A good and varied programme – mix of presentations, workshops and working in our own team to apply knowledge and lessons.” (Event delegate) |
Presentations
• Opening Remarks – National Perspective
Grahame Smith, National Workforce Plus Board and General Secretary, STUC
• Bringing About Cultural Change
Joe Dowd, Re:Focus
• Reaching the Hardest to Help
Tommy Burns, Equal Employability
Gill Scott, Equal Access
Action Points
In the afternoon, people discussed ways to apply what they had learned from the day in their own area. The key themes emerging included:
• There are lots of good examples of activities that work. We need to get better at identifying and mainstreaming these.
• We need to ensure that local and national targets recognise the distance travelled by an individual, as well as the overall outcome. This could help to recognise work with hard to reach – or hard to help – groups.
• Service user involvement is vital. But to be meaningful it needs investment in building the skills and capacity of staff and service users to work together.
• We need to build better links between health and employability services. This will require training and awareness raising – and will take time.
All of the action plans are available here.
Learning Points
We have produced five Learning Points based on the experiences of EQUAL:
• Working together to create ways into employment – the Re:Focus Development Partnership
• Creating pathways to work – Equal Employability Development Partnership
• Service user involvement in employability – the Equal Access Development Partnership
• Integrating health and employment in tackling employability issues – the Equal Access Development Partnership
• A case management approach to tackling employability issues – the Equal Access Development Partnership
“The Learning Point sheets were very useful” (Event delegate) |
Find out more...
The three EQUAL Employability Partnerships were:
• Re:Focus – 16 projects that tried out new approaches to helping people into work, based on creating links between employability, health and social care.
• Equal Employability – a partnership across Scotland working to involve the hardest to reach groups in employment and training.
• Equal Access – a central Scotland partnership developing new ways to support people experiencing inequality back into work.
What Next?
• Workforce Plus and the Scottish Centre for Regeneration will produce an online How To Guide to Employability
• A Communities of Practice will be developed focusing on building capacity amongst stakeholders and sharing learning on employability and health
• An E-bulletin will be launched, signposting people to employability activities
To find out more about any of these developments, contact Mike O’Donnell at the Workforce Plus Team on 0141 242 0200
Get more information on this subject in our Reading List for this event.
