Is the publicity-hungry Emma Harrison going to be called on to explain these terrible results? Perhaps she would say that they will do better when they are allowed to interfere in the lives of "whole families".
Thursday, 20 January 2011
Terrible results
We haven't anything yet about Emma Harrison's meeting on Tuesday with people from the Education Department. She hasn't mentioned it in her tweets, although she has talked about the reception at No. 10 for the Nordic Baltic MPs. I wonder if they talked about the figures for Flexible New Deal, which are out now for the period Oct 09 to Nov 10. I'm sure they'd have been impressed with the fact that of 315,000 people who started on the programme, 6% (that's right, 6%) got "sustained" i.e. long-term jobs. Short-term job outcomes weren't much better, at 10%. In the 5 regions where A4e had contracts they performed more or less the same as their competitors and their results were in line with the average. Worst was in central London with 9% short and 5% long-term jobs, while best was Cambridgeshire & Sussex, with 13% short and 8% long-term outcomes. (Remember, don't add the two percentages together. A short-term job turns into a sustained job.) No wonder there are worries about the Work Programme and its viability.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I "attended" an A4e programme after being out of work for a year due to ill health.It was when you had to attend for 3 months,great I thought I needed to retrain and gain a computer qualification.Yes I was told no problem,we can do that.
ReplyDeleteEvery week for 3 months I asked the same question and each time I was told,yes no problem..I am still waiting.The tutor was an ex-client(not her fault,sshe did her best)
Their idea of job search was to throw you a Yellow pages and told to apply for 3 jobs.The rest of the day was spent making bridges out of cardboard.
Things got so bad two trainees actually went to the complain to the local media,the article was shown on the local BBC station.
Job placement advisors were sending people to a local factory for so called full time jobs that turned out to last one or two days.
On the whole not a rewarding experience indeed how they actually managed to to get contracts renewed is actually beyond me.
From the lips of my "adviser": "We are a private company. We do not fund speculative training." "If you get a job offer that is conditional on completing a course, we would consider looking at funding."
ReplyDeleteOn asking for a First Aid at Work course, got told "You will have to source and fund training yourself".
I too asked for computer training and got directed to a free on-line MS Office "course" that covered the most basic of use (how to open/save a file, change fonts & tabs, etc). Despite listing IT support roles in my CV, A4e consider this "course" as appropriate.