Scotland's Devolved Employment Services: statistical summary August 2021

Summary findings

This statistical publication provides summary information on Scotland’s devolved employability services. This, the sixteenth edition, publishes statistics for the first three and a quarter years of Fair Start Scotland (FSS) from April 2018 to June 2021, and experimental statistics on employability support delivered under the No One Left Behind strategic approach, reporting on the first 2 years from April 2019 to March 2021.

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, there were 53,961 referrals and 35,918 starts from its launch in April 2018 up to June 2021. The number of starts includes 685 people who have previously received support on FSS - this has been allowed since April 2021^[2].

In the three month period from April – June 2021, there were 5,206 referrals and 3,413 starts on FSS. Referrals were 16% higher than the previous quarter (January - March 2021), and 98% higher than the same quarter in 2020. Starts were 13% higher than the previous quarter (January – March 2021) and 52% higher than the same quarter in 2020. The large increase mainly reflects disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic last year.

So far, 11,843 people have started a job after joining FSS. There were 1,338 job starts during April - June 2021, which is 43% higher than the quarter before, and 57% higher than the same period in 2020. The large increases partly reflect the fact that the preceding periods were times of unusually low job starts.

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 46% from year 2), 35% started a job (32% from year 1, 34% from year 2, 52% for starts in the first quarter of year 3), 23% sustained employment for 3 months, 18% for 6 months and 15% 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 77% 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 7,390 people^[3] were supported during the period April 2019 to March 2021, with 3,824 people starting in year 1 (April 2019 – March 2020), and 3,566 in year 2 (April 2020 – March 2021).