Fair Start Scotland: evaluation report 4 - year 3 overview

11. Conclusion

As anticipated the third year of delivery has been strongly shaped by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless findings suggest that FSS has adapted well to these conditions and has continued to offer a service which is highly rated by participants.

In particular the majority of participants reported that they did not face difficulties in accessing support and a clear majority continued to highly rate the elements of support they received. In addition, more than 90% of participants who took part in the telephone surveys continued to agree that FSS treated them with dignity and respect.

Similarly, feedback from providers suggested that the design of the service provided them with the flexibility required to adapt to the circumstances brought on by the pandemic.

While some progress has been made in relation to ongoing improvement of the service, this has been limited. It is perhaps unsurprising given the pandemic that FSS may have lacked some of its previous capacity to engage in continuous improvement, and to address issues highlighted in last year's evaluation report.

In particular findings from this year report suggest that certain groups such as individuals from minority ethnic groups, older individuals aged 50+ and those from rural locations continue to be underrepresented in the service despite some improvements being made. Related to this is the ongoing variance in job outcome rates seen for those with more significant labour market barriers including those with disabilities, older workers and individuals who meet early entry criteria.

While some of the issues around underrepresentation have recurred throughout the delivery of FSS, there is emerging evidence to suggest that the overall demographic profile of FSS participants may be shifting away from those further from the labour market. Findings from the survey, Management Information data analysis and local area case studies taken together suggest that there may be an increase in the proportion of participants with fewer barriers to employment as illustrated by the deceased of the proportion of disabled people, those from 15% most deprived areas and those who are disable and unemployed for more than 2 years over the years of delivery. While it is possible that this may have been accelerated by the onset of the pandemic, with an increase in individuals recently made unemployed, it is not possible to quantify the impact of COVID-19 as opposed to existing changes in participant demographics.

A related set of key findings from this year's evaluation centred on evidence generated by the economic evaluation of FSS. This analysis demonstrated that FSS offers a net positive return from the perspective of individual participants, public finances and society as a whole with the service outperforming expectations in the business case. While this presents a key positive finding for FSS it should also be recognized that this 'better than expected' assessment of value for money arises from the fact that the service ended up supporting more participants with fewer barriers to employment than was originally anticipated.

One of the core recommendations from last year's report centred on the ongoing need to build upon relationships between providers and local stakeholders in order to facilitate better local alignment and integration of services. While it is likely that the pandemic affected the capacity of FSS to engage in this work, it is clear from this year's findings that this remains an ongoing issue.

This year's report also allowed for reflection across the entire three years of delivery. Findings from this section suggest that while FSS has successfully achieved elements of its stated aims, most notably around delivering a service centred on fairness, dignity, respect and a voluntary approach to participation, that there is still room for improvement with regards to the reach of services, alignment and integration, offering a person-centred approach and providing support to those further from the labour market.

Recommendations & Next Steps

While recognising that work is already underway to address some of the areas for improvement as noted throughout this report, we have highlighted four key recommendations some of which are more focussed on the remainder of the contract delivery period of FSS whilst others are more appropriate in relation to the broader aspirations of SG and partners regarding the future of employability policy development and service delivery:

• Establish comprehensive measures to address the ongoing issue of underrepresentation of certain groups in FSS as well as variance in how different groups experience support provided by the service.
• Whilst recognising the need to balance flexibility with providing robust governance and quality assurance, we recommend taking learning from both the economic evaluation and other components of the evaluation to consider changes to reporting requirements and associated payment mechanisms for future delivery of employability services within Scotland, for example via No One Left Behind.
• Incorporate learning from the three years of evaluation into the implementation of the NOLB approach in partnership with Local Government, ensuring that effective decluttering of the employability landscape takes place, as part of the implementation of No One Left Behind.
• Continue to take steps to improve the effectiveness of support received by individuals with complex and multiple barriers to employment in order to ensure more equitable job outcomes are achieved.

With regards to next steps for the evaluation, the final FSS evaluation report is intended to be published by the end of 2022. This will be an impact evaluation of the service.

More detailed reports on this year's evaluation are also published alongside this overview report. These can also be found on the Scottish Government website:

Local Area Case Studies

Participant Phone Survey

Economic Evaluation