Advance to Work and Advance to Work Plus schemes (FOI)

Request

Can you please supply me with some statistics about the Advance to Work and Advance to Work Plus initiatives? In particular:

A

How many people have registered on these initiatives?

B

How many people have stayed in permanent employment for more than six months following the use of this service?

C

How many people have had to go back on the initiatives when a placement has not resulted in permanent employment or the employment has ended within six months?

D

How many employers have used the initiatives and successfully employed a person in a permanent position?

Could I please have the information in tables that show the numbers divided for each of the last three years?

E

Could I please have the information to show the specific work sectors of the placement?

Response

A

The Advance to Work scheme provides employment support for young people aged 16 to 24. Many jobseekers on this scheme are not claiming Income Support and therefore their engagement with the service is voluntary. Jobseekers can stay on the scheme as long as it takes them to secure work.

Advance Plus schemes are standalone courses providing a program of training in a specific industry, followed by up to six weeks workplace experience in an unpaid placement. If a jobseeker completes their placement but does not receive an offer of paid work, there is an additional two months job seeking support provided on the scheme. If there is no job start after this two month period and the jobseeker is required to continue to look for work, they will return to the general Back to Work service (BTW service).

B

Data to calculate how many jobseekers have remained in permanent employment for more than six months (sustainability data) is taken from employers’ contributions data. There is a complete data set for 2016, but the data for 2017 and 2018 is yet to be collated and would take in excess of 12.5 hours to process. The 2017 and 2018 sustainability data will be available at a later date.

C

Due to the nature of the schemes being industry specific, jobseekers will not return to the initiative if unsuccessful in finding work after two months additional support; they will continue job seeking with the general BTW service. Therefore no data on this is held.

D

E

Data is not held on the individual number of jobseekers who undertake a placement on an Advance Plus scheme, however below is a list of the industry work sectors for each of the schemes that a placement would be sourced in. More than one industry scheme may have been run in each year.

Article applied

Article 16 A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.