Evaluation lessons - Tailor training to employers' needs

Regeneration & Renewal, 22 August 2008

Work: SRB projects target worklessness

Aims and outline of project

Between 1994 and 2008, the SRB programme in the West Midlands received £600 million in funding. Regional development agency Advantage West Midlands used this to deliver two regional economic strategies during this period: Creating Advantage, which ran from 1999 to 2004, and its successor, Delivering Advantage, which runs until 2010. One of Delivering Advantage's main aims is to promote learning and skills, and to cut unemployment.

KEY LESSONS

Hannah Layton writes: The 2006 Treasury-commissioned Leitch report on skills suggested that, if the UK is to maintain its competitiveness and meet business demands, it must ensure that the workforce has skills that are economically valuable. It seems that, through some of its SRB-funded worklessness programmes, the West Midlands has made something of a head start on this front.

In Stoke-on-Trent, for example, the SRB programme took a demand-led approach to training, basing projects on the skills that employers said they were actually looking for, rather than on what unemployed clients said they would like to learn.

However, while the programme tailored training to employers' needs, the SRB projects targeting worklessness also offered jobless individuals plenty of support once they gained work, and the evaluation notes that this approach has helped to boost employment.

The report concludes that the West Midlands' approach offers significant lessons for future programmes in relation to cutting unemployment. As well as supporting people once they are in work, these include making job information more accessible, ensuring greater inter-agency working to help people with barriers such as chronic health conditions return to work, and providing effective outreach services for the most disengaged.

However, despite the projects' overall success in getting people into jobs or training, the report concedes that chronic pockets of disadvantage and comparatively high levels of unemployment remain in the region.

- Hannah Layton is a regeneration consultant at WM Enterprise.

- Evaluation of the Single Regeneration Budget in the West Midlands is available here

- Contact us. Do you know of an evaluation report with important lessons for other regeneration professionals? If so, contact Adam Branson on adam.branson@haymarket.com.