No One Left Behind and Fair Start Scotland

No One Left Behind and FSS are different approaches to employability support, varying over time in the support offered and groups targeted. This is likely to impact on both the demographics and outcomes of participants across both approaches. It is therefore not recommended to make direct comparisons between them. However, this short section considers both approaches together to give an indication of total demand for Scottish Government funded employability support over time.

Please note, the data presented here refers to starts and is not a unique count of individuals. For example, people have been able to re-join FSS since April 2021 (there must be a break of at least 13 week to be eligible to re-join) therefore FSS starts are not the same as unique individuals. FSS pre-employment support is available for 12 months, or up to 18 months in some cases. However, for No One Left Behind, participants are able to disengage and re-engage in support as required. Unlike FSS, regardless of the length of time between a participant disengaging and re-engaging with No One Left Behind, they are only ever counted once. It is also possible that people may have accessed both FSS and No One Left Behind. Data from April 2018 to March 2019 includes only FSS starts.  

There has been 97,233 starts on either No One Left Behind or FSS since April 2018 up to March 2023. In the most recent quarter, January – March 2023, there were 8,220 starts across No One Left Behind and FSS, the largest number in a single quarter. This was a 16% increase on the previous quarter and a 2% increase on the same quarter in the previous year. 

Figure 1: Number of starts on No One Left Behind and Fair Start Scotland, by quarter, from April 2018 to March 2023