Experiences of a ‘Welfare-to-Work’ Scheme/ Lewisham Strategic Partnership

Background:

This project, from 2012, explored people’s experiences of the Welfare-To-Work system in Lewisham. Previous mapping of the provisions to help people into sustainable employment revealed a complex, cluttered marketplace. The proliferation of many different funding streams, projects, and programmes targeting the same citizens, had little overall co-ordination. This meant a series of incoherent and repetitive support pathways for the customer. As such, the client wanted to know: what have been the experiences of people accessing the welfare-to-work scheme? And what would help improve those experiences and the employment outcomes?

Result:

In this ethnographic study, we spent time with five different participants, to explore and document a meaningful picture of their journeys back to work from long-term unemployment. The resulting ten-minute film informed and brought to life a written report by the Office for Public Management, which can be found here.

The film is divided into four sections, navigable via the Chapter button to the right of the play bar:

Context & employment history, Importance of personalised one-to-one support, Circular process & system challenges (inc. lack of coordination & inflexible training conditions), Support not taking personal barriers into account.

The report recommended a number of practical steps to improve the outcome of citizens, including:

Streamlining regulation to lessen the bureaucratic burden on service providers and enhance their ability to adapt to just needs; Aligning performance management arrangements, to help ensure that all the different service providers are seeking to achieve similar or complimentary outcomes; Actively redesigning service boundaries around the needs of customers; Engaging service users and pursuing user directed change.

Testimonial:

“You were responsive to deal with, and able to build honest, trusting relationships with a range of people, providing a safe place for them to share their views and experiences. The work helped us to get under the skin of the issue and informed a successful national pilot that we carried out in Lewisham.”

Joel Hartfield – Principal Policy & Projects Officer, LSP