Scotland's Devolved Employment Services: statistical summary February 2021

Summary findings

This statistical publication provides summary information on Scotland's devolved employability services. This, the fourteenth edition, publishes statistics for Fair Start Scotland (FSS) from April 2018 to December 2020 and new experimental statistics on the No One Left Behind approach to employability delivery, reporting on those receiving support from April 2019 to March 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, 44,253 referrals were received and 29,473 people started receiving employability support from its launch in April 2018 up to December 2020.

In the three month period from October to December 2020, 3,246 people were referred and 2,390 people started on FSS. Referrals were 11% lower than the previous quarter (July – September 2020), and 19% lower than the same quarter in 2019 (October – December 2019). Starts were 11% lower than the previous quarter and 17% lower than the same period in 2019. Referrals and starts have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and have been at lower levels since March 2020. There was a further reduction in referrals and starts in December 2020. However, similar decreases were seen in 2018 and 2019, so some or all of this change is likely to be seasonal.

So far, 9,484 people had started a job after joining FSS. There were 1,068 job starts in October – December 2020, which is 20% lower than the quarter before, but 9% higher than the same period last year. Job starts, as with referrals and starts are usually lower in December, which may explain the decrease seen here.

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, 50% of people left FSS early without completing the programme of support offered or achieving a job outcome, 33% started a job, 24% sustained employment for 3 months, 19% sustained employment for 6 months and 13% sustained employment for at least 12 months.

However, people who started work had high rates of sustaining it: 72% of people starting work went on to sustain employment for 3 months, 79% 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 3,824 people^[2] were supported during the first year of delivery, from 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020.