Scotland's Devolved Employment Services: statistical summary February 2023

About this publication

This statistical publication provides summary information on Scotland's devolved employability services. This, the 22nd edition, publishes official statistics for the first four and three quarter years of Fair Start Scotland (FSS), from April 2018 to December 2022, and experimental statistics on employability support delivered under the No One Left Behind strategic approach, reporting on the first three and a half years from April 2019 to September 2022. FSS is an employability support service, launched in April 2018, which aims to help unemployed people into sustainable employment. There are two sources of information for the FSS statistics presented in this publication. The first source is the Scottish Government's Scottish Employability Tracking System (SETS) which tracks referrals, starts and outcomes for those starting employment. This system contains no personal characteristics information and provides management information in relation to performance. The second source is a data return provided quarterly by FSS service providers with key characteristic information for participants such as age, gender, long-term health conditions, disability and ethnic group. It does not contain any service level information. These information sources both contain an anonymous ID number which is used to link them together to create a final dataset for analysis.

No One Left Behind, introduced from April 2019, 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. No One Left Behind data is collected and recorded on management information systems by Scottish Local Authorities as part of the process for providing support to people. Local Authorities in turn provide some of this data to the Scottish Government on a quarterly basis for monitoring and reporting purposes.

Shared measurement Framework Data reporting Template

From October 2022 onwards, a new data template (Access the new data template - Publications | Employability in Scotland) co-designed with Local Authorities and aligned to the Shared Measurement Framework will be in place and over time the statistics in this report will reflect this new information. Some Local Authorities opted to transition to the new template for data covering this latest quarter, therefore the statistics covered in this report come from a mixture of the old and new template. Only information available through both templates is presented in this publication. It should be noted that while this transition takes place, numbers may fluctuate more than usual but we will work closely with Local Authorities to ensure returns are accurate and of high quality.

This statistical publication is split into two main sections, the first covers official statistics related to FSS and the second covers experimental statistics related to the No One Left Behind strategic approach. Further detailed statistics including additional breakdowns not necessarily presented in this report are published in accompanying tables alongside the report.