No One Left Behind: delivery plan

4. Working Together for Scotland

We are committed to a partnership approach in the design, delivery, implementation and improvement of employability services for the benefit of people who need them. To be effective this must extend beyond the Scottish and Local Government Partnership Working Agreement for Employability and harness the combined strengths of the range of third, private and public sector partners nationally and locally who can help to deliver a strong, vibrant and successful employability system.

Strong and effective leadership will be critical from all partners, working beyond organisational boundaries, maximising collaboration and establishing trust, as we jointly respond to the complexities of system change in an already uncertain operating environment.

The establishment of both the Employability Operational Group and Senior Leaders Group provides forums to share best practice, provide constructive challenge, explore opportunities to innovate and maximise further collaboration. However it is acknowledged that much of the dialogue around design and delivery will be between partners at a local level and through local structures.

This is why we will be developing an enhanced partnership model that embodies place and needs based approaches. As part of the Community Planning structure in Scotland, existing Local Employability Partnerships (LEPs) provide a solid foundation on which to develop this. It is important too, that we capitalise on the strengths, capacity and knowledge of all those involved in supporting local communities, to deliver better service alignment and integration.

We firmly believe that service users must remain at the heart of all that we do and feel empowered to play an active and ongoing role in shaping the services they access. We have already begun discussions with citizens with lived experience of engaging with existing employment support services to better understand their experience and identify what works well and what requires further development. We must be wholly committed to engagement throughout both development and delivery of No One Left Behind as we continue to drive towards embedding the Scottish Approach to Service Design in our work, creating a space for users to actively participate in designing service elements agreed nationally.

As well as embedding the service design approach, we are putting people at the centre of decision-making through the Shared Measurement Framework. The Shared Measurement Framework will set out the key questions we need to answer to understand how well services are reaching and working for people, as well as what data we need to collect to answer those questions.

We have been engaging with people in a wide range of roles and organisations to identify our shared 'key questions'. This has included discussions with citizens with lived experience, from whom we are learning about their experiences of providing and using their own data. This will help us consider person-centred approaches to measurement as we develop the framework.

We greatly value the time that partners and users have already invested, and will continue to commit, in supporting the Workstreams established and recognise that is important that their input results in tangible outputs, actions and improvements. Similarly, we must also maximise the opportunity to learn from the first phase of No One Left Behind Delivery, as well as the range of programmes and interventions fully utilising the skills and expertise that exist across the system in Scotland. In order to ensure that we are capturing and sharing this detail, we will develop a Continuous Improvement Strategy for the delivery of Employability Services.