Scotland's Devolved Employment Services: statistical summary May 2021

Summary findings

This statistical publication provides summary information on Scotland's devolved employability services. This, the fifteenth edition, publishes statistics for the first three years of Fair Start Scotland (FSS) from April 2018 to March 2021, and experimental statistics on employability support delivered under the No One Left Behind strategic approach, reporting on the period from April 2019 to December 2020.

FSS is an employability support service, launched in April 2018, that aims to help unemployed people into sustainable employment. No One Left Behind is a new approach to employability delivery which moves away from funding and delivering a number of separate and distinct employability programmes to a more flexible approach^[1].

For FSS, 48,755 referrals were received and 32,504 people started receiving employability support from its launch in April 2018 up to March 2021.

Referrals and starts have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and were at lower levels from March 2020 until the most recent quarter (January – March 2021) where they have returned to approximately pre-COVID levels. In the three month period from January - March 2021, 4,502 people were referred and 3,028 people started on FSS. Referrals were 39% higher than the previous quarter (October – December 2020), and 2% higher than the same quarter in 2020 (January – March). Starts were 27% higher than the previous quarter (October – December 2020) and 4% lower than the same quarter in 2020 (January – March).

So far, 10,417 people have started a job after joining FSS. There were 838 job starts during January - March 2021, which is 27% lower than the quarter before, and 20% lower than the same period in 2020. The level of job starts was similar to the first quarter of COVID-19 disruption (April – June 2020) when 852 participants started a job.

Job outcome rates can only be reported for start cohorts where enough time has passed in pre-employment support and for outcomes to be achieved. For participants where data is complete, 49% of people left FSS early without completing the programme of support offered or achieving a job outcome (53% from year 1, and 45% from year 2), 33% started a job (32% from year 1, 34% from year 2), 23% sustained employment for 3 months, 19% for 6 months and 14% for at least 12 months.

People who started work had high rates of sustaining it: 71% of people starting work went on to sustain employment for 3 months, 78% of those who sustained employment for 3 months went on to reach at least 6 months and 76% of those who sustained employment for 6 months went on to reach at least 12 months.

Experimental statistics for No One Left Behind show that 6,554 people^[2] were supported during the period April 2019 to December 2020, with 3,824 people starting in year 1 (April 2019 – March 2020), and 2,730 in the first three quarters of year 2 (April – December 2020).