Finance Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Official Report 464KB pdf

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Employability

Good morning and welcome to the 24th meeting in 2012 of the Finance Committee of the Scottish Parliament. I remind those present to turn off mobile phones, tablets, BlackBerrys and so on.

The first item of business is to take evidence by videoconference from representatives of the International Labour Organization in Geneva as part of the committee’s examination of the need to improve the employability of individuals experiencing high levels of multiple deprivation.

I welcome Laura Brewer and Donna Koeltz—I hope that I have pronounced that correctly. I ask you to introduce yourselves and I invite one of you to make an opening statement to the committee.

Thank you. I will just check that you can hear us at that end.

Yes.

I work in the skills and employability department of the ILO, in the area of employability of disadvantaged youth. We are pleased to be invited to participate. It is not often that we get to work with developed countries; most of our work is in developing countries. I was particularly pleased to see that you had not only read our material but referenced it. I was impressed with your proposals to take the next steps and I look forward to making a few critical comments or suggestions but mostly to talking about a package of support that you have put forward that we may be able to facilitate.

Donna Koeltz is a colleague from the same department who works in the area of employment services.

Good morning. I am the senior employment services specialist here in Geneva. That title entails dealing with countries on public employment services and private employment agency initiatives. Like Laura Brewer, I was interested to see the comments that you have gathered through your discussions and consultations over the summer months—you have really gone into a lot of the most critical issues.

I would be happy to present a couple of quick points to the committee in relation to where public employment services in particular can have some impact and influence on those issues at various stages in a person’s career and preparation for a career. I can also provide you with some examples of how other countries around the world have organised their services in order to respond to employment needs in the most effective and efficient manner.

Like Laura Brewer, I appreciate the fact that we have been given the opportunity to be part of the committee’s consultation.

Thank you.

Did you want to move to questions?

No. I would like you to make some points, as has been suggested, and we will go from there.

Although I work in the area of employability, particularly on skills for youth employment, we always need to reflect on the fact that there are not enough jobs. We need to think about what we are training young people for. It is important to keep them attached to the labour market—there is no question about that—but there is a great deal of frustration about the continuous training for nothing.

We need to think about creating employment and training opportunities in those sectors where youth have both an interest and an added advantage. Those tend to be areas of tourism, information and communications technology, the environment, the arts and sports. The areas in which we are seeing growth in the economy and big job creation potential are the greening of the economy, the health sector and the education system, so I suggest a focus on the potential that young people can bring to those areas. For example, how can social media impact on education? How can ICT be used in the health sector? When it comes to the environment, it is young people who are most aware and most interested.

We also need to think about opportunities for entrepreneurship, especially in areas of natural resource restoration, and about the steps that are involved in young people setting up businesses, such as opportunities for microfinance and the availability of loans, and also the number of steps that it takes to establish a business.

I am excited about the model that you have put forward. As you have said, it is important to keep young people in education, training or employment. Your model seems to be based on those who are already out of the formal system, although I note that you have not defined the disadvantaged groups. One thing to keep in mind is that, although you might be dealing with those people now, you also need to think about delaying young people’s exit from formal education, which requires flexible delivery systems, thinking outside the box, peer-to-peer teaching, courses such as outward bound initiatives and distance learning, although not just through a combination of books and the internet, which can be frustrating for people who have to sit for hours working under that approach. It is better for distance learning to allow people to contact others to ask questions through their mobile phones and so on.

The key is to identify the risk of drop-out early and address it before it happens. Donna Koeltz will talk about that. In providing a second chance at formal education, it is important to separate the cohorts. Sixteen to 19-year-olds can return to the classroom, but beyond that there has not been much success with return to the classroom, so other modes of delivery are needed. What happens too often with second-chance programmes is that there is a compromise on quality, because there is a desire to move people quickly through the system. That catches up with us eventually, because people end up in low-skilled jobs.

I could say lots about active labour market programmes, which are an area that you are focusing on. I appreciate your cost benefit analysis, but I have some points to add. Reviews of ALMPs always state that they are expensive and ask whether the outcomes are really worth it. Most of the studies focus on short and medium-term results and not on long-term ones. We do not look at the second generation, at intergenerational poverty or at intergenerational lack of education. Those factors have to be taken into the equation, as do other things such as the cost of a minimum security prison place for a young person, the cost of care and the cost of supporting people and their offspring later on.

The paper that you put together mentions an interesting model called Barnardo’s works. The steps that it involves are useful, but it kicks in a little bit late, after the young people concerned have been out of the system for a while. It is essential that disadvantaged young people are not all grouped together. You should keep in mind that the 15 to 24 age group was decided on by the United Nations for keeping track, statistically, of young people and what they are doing, but we have seen that models that work for people from the age of 21 will work for people up to the age of 30. I know that you are saying that if we focus on youth, we will miss the next cohort. I do not think that there is a need to focus on the statistical categories of young people.

It is necessary to keep in mind that people’s needs and learning styles are very different, depending on their disadvantage. The needs of a young pregnant woman will be different from those of a migrant with poor English-speaking skills. The ways in which someone learns will be different depending on whether they need community support or family intervention. The package of services changes slightly, but the important thing is the training part of it and how to focus it on the needs of disadvantaged people without seeing them as a homogenous group.

One of the best ways of teaching disadvantaged youth is what we call the learn, earn, save and invest approach. Learning while earning keeps young people interested and rewards them for what they are doing. We need to teach them to save the money that they make and invest it, because that brings it back into the community and the economy and results in young people making a better contribution on the ground.

I am happy to talk about technical and vocational education and training or formal apprenticeships if you have questions about that, but I did not see much mention of it in your paper, so I will leave it at that for now.

I would like to talk about a couple of the points that Laura Brewer made in a bit more detail, particularly in relation to how public employment services and their officers can have an impact at various stages in the cycle.

It has been mentioned a number of times in your discussions that prevention is the first course of action and that it should be taken as early as possible. Along with public employment services around the world, we promote the idea that career guidance in the school system needs to be supported by information that public employment services officers have. We encourage a much closer linkage between the educational system and the staff who work in public employment services so that they can share labour market information that provides indications of what job opportunities are currently in demand and what job opportunities are projected to be in demand in the medium and—sometimes—the longer term, depending on what information is available in a country. We also want much better occupational information to be provided, which includes job descriptions, the activities that are typically involved in particular occupations and the educational requirements, as well as the anticipated wage levels and the opportunities for career advancement that exist in those occupations.

Young people need to have as much of that information as possible at the point at which they are in the latter part of their secondary school education and are planning for their further education so that, in preparing for the workforce, they can make as informed a career decision as they can. That will ensure that, as they get closer to the point at which they want to enter the labour market, they will be able to take up positions that they will be happy with and be willing to remain in later in their lives.

One thing that we have found has worked extremely well in that regard is the inclusion in curriculums in many countries of on-the-job work placements for many students who are in the final two or three years of secondary school education. Such placements enable them to assess what it means to be a welder or a carpenter, or to work as a computer programmer. Such arrangements require very close dialogue between worker organisations and employer organisations, of course, as well as very close dialogue with the school system. Those linkages can be made with the assistance of public employment services, which regularly deal with all of those organisations.

10:15

Prevention also means ensuring that people who have got into the workforce are able to stay in it. That involves life skills training and, in times of economic downturn, reacting quickly and offering interventions such as short-time work programmes to keep people in the workforce, even at a reduced level of productivity, to ensure that they do not lose their skills.

A lot of research and evidence shows that young people tend to be much more vulnerable in economic downturns and that they are usually the first to lose their jobs. It is important that we do everything we can to prevent that from happening because, once they get into the unemployment ranks, it is much more difficult to move them back into employment.

The next stage of intervention is the stage that we usually think of when we think of public employment services: job placement activities that are performed for all unemployed jobseekers. Again, an early response is essential—that has been proved over and over—but that is not the only thing that is essential. We recognise that jobseekers come into the system with differing levels of ability and facing different types of barriers, so jobseeker profiling is important. Such profiling is common in Europe. It has different names in different parts of the world but, basically, it involves individual counselling and discussion with jobseekers to determine what types of barriers they face in order to assist them in developing a transition from school to work or from job to job. It involves an action plan that will suit their needs, which will include various labour market interventions and will look at their current level of education, work experience—if they have any—aptitudes, interests and other activities. It is a matter of looking at the whole picture, and helping people to determine, from what they already have, an immediate job to which they can realistically aspire and identify where there may be gaps and interventions that can help to close those gaps and help them to move into higher levels of the same occupation.

The approaches that seem to have the most impact with jobseekers in general, including youths, are those that combine a number of different interventions in a package. That has been acknowledged in a lot of the responses to your consultation. I am talking about a combination of individual counselling to jobseekers to ensure that they are well aware of what they already have and what they will need, and labour market interventions. In some cases, job subsidy initiatives can be the perfect solution in dealing with educated unemployed youths. They can give employers opportunities with reduced wages or holidays from paying social security benefits to test the jobseeker’s skill level and compatibility in their organisation. Well-targeted internships can provide the same opportunities. Internships can also be used in school breaks so that students who are still in the education system can learn a little bit more about the occupations for which they are training. That will help them to focus on the things that they need to fill the gaps.

Well-targeted public employment programmes, particularly those that have included some types of skills training and life skills training, have been very effective in moving young people into the workforce. In some cases, entrepreneurial training for people to start their own businesses can be successful, but we realise that many young people do not necessarily have the business background, networks or capital that they would need to successfully start their own business. Therefore, such training is often not necessarily the first choice.

I mentioned at the beginning that I would share a couple of delivery models. Many Governments around the world have realised that there are many things that need to be addressed and many groups of vulnerable workers with issues that need to be resolved. In most cases, however, they simply cannot afford to do all of this on their own and do not have expertise at the required level to deal with certain issues. As a result, many countries have looked at partnership arrangements with other stakeholders, both not-for-profit and non-governmental organisations and private employment agencies, to provide these services on their behalf to a certain degree and to some of the target groups.

I will give the committee two examples. In many countries, one of the most effective approaches has been a decentralised model in which public employment offices continue to provide the full range of services in large urban centres while in more outlying and rural areas agreements are reached with municipal offices, training institutions and in some cases private agencies to offer the same level of service on their behalf. In other words, the public employment service is actually provided by different external service providers. That can happen through a contractual financial agreement or, as in the Philippines and Argentina, through sharing training costs or providing access to electronic labour exchanges that Government offices have developed and used. Such an approach has proved to be very successful in extending outreach and ensuring that services are provided to those most in need.

Another very interesting model can be found in Canada, which has not only decentralised the delivery of many enhanced employment services to the provincial level but adopted a contracting-out process that involves many third-party service providers, many of whom have specialised expertise in issues relating to one or more of the target groups. In what has been a particularly effective approach, many NGOs and not-for-profit organisations provide services that deal with a wide range of issues faced by youth, from employment matters to other types of problems such as leaving school early, drug issues and interpersonal issues, all of which impact on their ability to find employment. The model has also worked particularly well with persons with disabilities.

I will end there, convener, but I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have about this area.

Thank you very much for that comprehensive introduction. As usual at Finance Committee evidence sessions, I as committee convener will ask a number of questions to begin with and then open it up to other committee members. As time is limited, I will restrict myself this morning, which is something that I do not always do. I suggest that when they ask a question colleagues introduce themselves very briefly.

Ms Brewer, you talked about the importance of maintaining young people’s interest and focusing on where they might have an added advantage. Given your comment that we should not consider them as a homogeneous group, do you think it more important to work one on one with younger people to find out their skills and talents, even if it is more costly than training people in groups? Is such an approach more successful in ensuring that people end up in the mainstream labour market?

Are you going to ask a number of questions, or do you want me to respond to that one?

I ask you to respond to that question, because I want to maintain the time that we have available. If I ask a couple of questions, I might restrict my colleagues’ time.

I do not think that one on one is the way to go if we want to identify a young person’s talents or interests. Those things are usually evident; there are young people in school who are much more interested in sports, music or fine arts or who are very good with ICT, but often schools cannot cater for their needs and there is no way of recognising qualifications for those things outwith the school system. A system is needed that can give credit to those who learn in different ways or who take on different activities. The issue is not identifying those talents but finding ways—in what is often a strict educational programme—of allowing them to come through.

A good example is the struggle in international baccalaureate degrees to get teachers for higher-level ICT programmes, because the young people on those programmes have more ability than those who teach them have. At the International School of Geneva, students have taught other students higher-level ICT. In such things, we know that the potential and interest are there, but the question is how to cater to that or how to acknowledge what has been learned elsewhere.

We have taken evidence from people who say that 13-week or 26-week courses are not the optimum to provide long-term success for disadvantaged young people. What is the ILO’s view on the optimum time for interventions?

My view differs a little from Laura Brewer’s response, because I think that more of an individual assessment is needed at the beginning to determine what such individuals need and then they can be placed in groups. We know that young people work effectively among themselves and that a lot of peer-group learning occurs. What matters is not so much the time that is involved as the combination of interventions that is offered. That depends on the type of training—on whether the aim is to develop life skills or a technical skill.

The problem with many disadvantaged youth is that they do not want to be involved in any one activity for a particularly long time, so a range of options needs to be provided to keep them interested, as Laura Brewer said. We must identify the barriers and come up with a plan of action with them that allows them to see how they will move from one step to the next and how all the different steps will lead to much-enhanced chances of getting and keeping a job.

Short interventions should perhaps be coupled together in a package. The package might last far longer than 14 weeks; it could include self-assessment, formal training, workshops in which people deal with their peers, job-finding clubs and on-the-job work placements. The package could provide a range of things for a total of much longer than 14 weeks, although no one intervention would be that long—an intervention might last only a couple of months. I hope that that is clear.

I open the session to colleagues. The first question will be asked by the deputy convener, John Mason.

Good morning. I am an MSP for part of the east end of Glasgow, which is one of the poorer and more challenging areas of Scotland.

I was interested in Ms Brewer’s point about what we train people for. Here, we seem to struggle with the fact that too many people are trained in things such as politics and not enough people are trained in engineering or ICT. Are other countries squaring that better?

No—well, the interest in ICT in developed countries is very high but, for many people, what is provided is not challenging enough. We limit the ICT and how it can be used. We do not innovate enough and we do not allow young people to innovate enough.

The best way to deal with ICT is to involve young people. We could brainstorm around the table and find that, lo and behold, young people have many other ways of doing something. Under corporate social responsibility programmes, businesses are asked what they can do to help young people. However, when we turned it around and asked a group of young people what they could do to help various types of business, the young people had many innovative ideas, which most of us could not even get our heads around.

10:30

It is not that young people are not interested in ICT; it is that the subject is not challenging in school. The European computer driving licence was about learning to use Word and Excel, which is not as interesting as learning how to get information from here to India through a mobile phone, to show someone how to do something—that is exactly how the United Nations volunteer service works; it is innovative about getting information to remote areas. That is where I think young people can have an advantage. It is an area that they need to understand better, to see that there is labour market potential for them.

Thank you. I was interested by Ms Koeltz’s saying that young people should do work placements while they are still at school, perhaps during the vacation. In Scotland, many work placements are for only one week in the school year. How long should a young person spend in a workplace, if they are to understand it?

In Canada, for example, many technical courses include a full semester during which students are placed on a project—there are many charitable projects that do things such as build houses for disadvantaged people—and work on site with contractors and learn how to do the job. Of course, in certain places there are health and safety issues, and people have to be cautious about how much work they have the young people do, but the approach gives students an opportunity to see exactly what the job involves.

It is not practical in every case to have work placements that last a whole semester. One week is better than nothing, but a little longer would be better, to give young people the opportunity to see what it is like to have to be at work on time every day for a number of weeks and to report to a supervisor and so on, so that they learn time management and discipline. One week is nice, but it is not enough—just as a two-week holiday does not give people an idea of what it would be like to be unemployed or retired the whole time. People need enough time on the job to get a feel for what it is like. A week is just a taster, and students probably do not get into the details of what they would generally be doing if they were in that occupation—it would be more like a study visit.

If work placements are not possible, the employment services and education system can organise careers fairs and bring in business people and workers in occupations that are quite common in the community. A careers fair could go on for more than a day; it could go on for a week or two, or there could be a careers month, when young people have opportunities to get a better sense of what a job involves.

I have heard many stories from youth around the world who have spent a lot of time and energy being trained for a particular job only to discover that the job was nothing like they expected it to be, which led them immediately to look for a different lifelong career. That is such a pity. No one can afford to invest in something that is not what they want in the long run. The more we can do to help young people to learn about jobs, the better off we will all be in the long run.

It is important to remember that it is not about spending the holidays on a work placement—I am not sure whether that was clear from what Donna Koeltz said. The placement is part of the training programme and can happen in school time.

We had an experiment with the United Kingdom Government on what we called training passports. We looked at it in relation to the Olympic games, starting in China. The idea was to credit what young people learned when they did volunteer work during the Olympics. If we take that example to Scotland, when that young person is in the work setting for a week and then back in the classroom for a week and so on, it is about their commitment to that work, their ability to understand teamwork, their confidence to ask questions and to know when their place is to take the lead and when it is to follow. It is about time management and working with others. Those are the kinds of things that we think we can teach in a classroom.

Too many countries are putting in a curriculum on core employability skills, in which they try to teach things such as conflict resolution on the job and the work ethic. It just adds one more part to a curriculum. It should either be in the curriculum or be something that you do in the workplace. Employers now want that when people arrive—they used to be very happy to teach it when the person arrived, but that is no longer the case. It is important, however, to realise that that is not the way students should spend holidays, summer breaks and Christmas breaks. Such things are for actual training techniques.

I represent a traditional working area in Lanarkshire, in which the industries were, formerly, steel manufacturing and coal mines. Educationists in the area have identified a trend over a period. If we look at cohorts of boys and girls, as they go from primary school to secondary school, there appears to be a pattern in which, while the girls continue on the trajectory that has been predicted for them, when the boys arrive at second or third year and are making subject choices in anticipation of their careers, attainment levels start to tail off. How typical is that? Do you have any examples of that from elsewhere? What was done to address it?

That is a common problem in areas in which there is a particular industry. In this case, with coal mines, the appeal would be greater for young boys than for young girls. That is the environment to which those boys are exposed and they realise quickly, from the communities in which they live, that they do not necessarily need to go on to higher education to work in the local industry. We therefore have to expose them to that which is beyond their local community, or within their community but in job areas that may require more—or less—education.

I ask someone what they want to do and they say, “I want to work in the coal mine because I need only this much education and I can make this much money. These are the hours I’d work. It’s a great job.” If we then find 10 other jobs that are similar in the sense of how much education they would need—maybe a little bit more—and we put the portfolios in front of them, we realise where their interest really lies. They look at the number of hours that they would put in and what the career pattern would be. It is all programmed out. When they look, they immediately start to question what they want to do: “I never really wanted to work in a coal mine. I just know what it’s like to work in a coal mine,” or, “I know what it’s like to be a teacher because I grew up in a family of teachers.” It is about exposing young people to work that is outside the industries that are right on their doorstep.

Good morning. I represent a very rural area of Scotland that has employment problems. My understanding, from reading the reports that we have here, is that low self-esteem and confidence are barriers to young people actively looking for work. Earlier, our convener asked about the support that is required for young people. The approach in Denmark, for example, in which individuals are involved on a one-to-one basis for a period with a young person seems to be successful. Do you have an opinion on that?

I can give another example of where that approach has worked well. Low self-esteem and low confidence are definitely a problem for many young people. That can extend beyond youth to people who simply cannot move back into the labour force quickly. The example that I would like to share comes from Buenos Aires in Argentina, where a corporate social responsibility project was initiated by the employment service, which involved several large—in some cases multinational—businesses. Those businesses worked among themselves and with the unions to identify supervisors in various parts of their organisations and to offer a variety of job experiences. As it was a project to test how the approach would work, 200 young people who basically typified street kids were targeted. None of them was older than 21 or 22, but they were virtually already resigned to being permanently out of the labour force. They had dropped out of school early and had no idea what they wanted to do or what they should do next.

The young people were mentored one on one by supervisors and the companies provided the work experiences free of charge. The supervisors helped the young people to do simple jobs, but the whole idea was more about life-skills training and about helping the young people to see what they could do to bolster their self-esteem, rather than about giving them things that might be too challenging for them at the beginning.

The mentors also focused on what the young people could do if they had a higher standard of education, with the aim of trying to encourage them to go back into the school system. At the end of the six-month programme, more than 50 per cent—in fact, it was closer to 75 per cent—of the 200 young people went back into the school system, and many of them remained in close contact with their supervisors even when they went back into the school system. In some cases, the companies continued to allow the young people to come in on weekends and in their school holidays to work part time and earn an income. While they were in the mentoring programme, they were provided with subsidies through the public employment service programme.

The scheme worked well, although such an approach can be labour intensive. To make it work, it requires a strong link between the service agencies and private enterprises, as well as the full support and agreement of the unions. When that approach works, it is very nice and can change the pattern of young people’s lives. It is labour intensive and the numbers are small compared with the total figures, but in my opinion every little helps to move things in the right direction. That can demonstrate how profitable the approach can be and it can perhaps encourage more employers to be partners in such initiatives.

I am an MSP for Edinburgh—where the Parliament is based—and surrounding areas. I was taken by your comments on entrepreneurial training. You identified obvious challenges with that to do with networks, capital and business skills. However, some of the best entrepreneurs ever had no qualifications whatever and came from high levels of deprivation, but they just had a brilliant idea and the determination to make something happen. In your experience, how successful has entrepreneurship training been? Do you have examples of good practice that we might be interested in following up?

10:45

That is a good question; the subject is dear to my heart. I believe that we rely too heavily on entrepreneurship, as if it will solve all the problems. We have unemployment and there is no job creation, but we have the idea that everybody will become an entrepreneur, particularly in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa. It is not something that we have looked at in developed countries. I was raised to understand that less than 5 per cent of the population is capable of becoming or interested in being an entrepreneur. Can we really train people to become entrepreneurs?

The ILO has two training programmes in the area—one is called know about business and the other is called start and improve your business. What I like about them is not that people start businesses at the end of them, but that they get young people to understand the labour market better. They are good tools for people to learn some core work skills and about what is involved in the labour market—how it works and how people can find niches in it. The programmes are about exposing people to opportunities and not about training people to be entrepreneurs. I question whether we can train people to do that.

When I taught on a master of business administration programme, I found that although people with Harvard MBAs were the first people to be hired, the big companies were frustrated because those people could never just give a spontaneous answer. They had to do all the research and background work first, and in the meantime opportunities were often lost. I do not think that it is necessarily possible to teach people to be entrepreneurs, but the programmes are a good way to teach them about the labour market and how it works so that they understand business better.

I am the member of the Scottish Parliament for the Dumfriesshire constituency, which is partly urban and partly rural.

I am interested in what you said about learning outwith the school environment, the learning that young people are doing for themselves and the problem of identifying and accrediting that. You mentioned that in connection with ICT skills, which many people teach themselves—they are not taught the skills at school, but acquire them elsewhere.

Entrepreneurship is another skill that many young people acquire for themselves rather than being taught it, and there are other examples in the creative fields. People also learn skills from vocational training, in the community or from working with their families, particularly in rural environments.

Are there any examples of how such learning can be recognised? I do not think that it is reflected in the way in which we accredit people, yet it is central, because there is nothing better than knowing how to learn for yourself rather than having to sit and receive wisdom from others.

I must say that that is an area that I know little about. We have struggled with how we can recognise and accredit non-formal training in relation to national qualifications and frameworks, for example. Employers often recognise such things without accreditation. In employer surveys, we see more and more that employers like to hire women who have taken time out from the labour force and have raised a family, kept a household together and managed household budgets, because when they come into the workplace they have those skills behind them. However, nobody gets a certificate to confirm that they have managed a household and that they therefore have good management and finance skills.

We struggle with the issue. People in various sectors are considering non-formal and informal learning, and apprenticeship systems have come to the fore once again. During the crisis, we have had more and more requests for various forms of apprenticeship systems. They are based on models from Germany and Switzerland, but those have not been successfully replicated elsewhere. We are looking into opportunities to give credit for non-curriculum, non-classroom, non-formal education, but mostly we draw on experiences of that rather than give advice on the subject.

I will say one more thing about that. Again, although it is not accredited learning, it is possible, when jobseekers work with employment counsellors, for them to examine, for example, what they have learned through volunteer work, from jobs and from the education system. Even young people who have never had formal work experience and women returning to the labour force after a period away can look at the types of competence that they have developed from different experiences in their lives and make those marketable abilities from which employers can benefit. Those are called functional curriculum vitae or functional résumés, whereby they can look at the broader picture of what the job will entail—again, occupational information will be useful—and translate what they have done in all the different aspects of their life and show how they are able to meet the requirements of the job without formal accreditation.

That is also useful for employers because they do not have to try to figure out what the person can do for them; the person comes in and is able to demonstrate not only their knowledge of what they are applying for but what skills they can bring. Laura Brewer gave an excellent example in the case of women returning to the labour force, because they will have, from trying to manage a family, developed a lot of skills including time management, conflict resolution and financial planning.

Thank you. That has exhausted the questions from the committee. However, I still have something that I wish to focus on and ask you about.

There is a plethora of different programmes to try to assist disadvantaged young people and, indeed, older people in Scotland—never mind in the rest of the UK, Europe or the world. For us, evaluation is obviously key because there is a real issue about having to compare one programme with another to see what is successful. We want to invest in programmes that have proved to be successful and effective, so evaluation of labour market programmes is fundamental. Do you have any models of good practice in that regard that you can share with us? Does your organisation carry out its own evaluations of such programmes around the world? Either or both of you can answer those questions.

As I said, most of our work is in developing countries and much of our work there is donor driven, and the donors often set the evaluation criteria. Evaluation is often difficult and it is expensive and time consuming, so donors are not prepared to put their money into that.

I noted the reference to the youth employment inventory. Through the inventory and the youth employment network, the World Bank collected and analysed data on many areas, one of which was employability. That is probably the most popular labour force programme by far. Unfortunately, there is always a focus on the supply side, but that is the way it is.

The reviews showed a lot of interesting information, which I see has been referenced in the committee’s paper. What it does not do is look enough at ones that were done in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. I suggest that there should be a focus on those—I think that there are 550 practices in there. The majority were from OECD countries, but that is not where we draw most of our information from. We have probably tended to ignore that and have looked more at sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

However, I think that there might be some good models in there. All of them have had an evaluation, and I believe that there is a synthesis report that talks about criteria for good practice. We look at lessons learned and at certain criteria that occur across different programmes and indicate success. Often, they cannot be replicated as is, but you can quickly pick up on those criteria that you must have, then innovate around that.

So, my proposal is to look at that area. I do not think that we have done enough work in that regard, because of the nature of our client.

The fact that there is not enough empirical evidence available at the moment is a universal concern. In fact, delegates at the international labour conference in June who attended the discussions on youth employment prepared a call to action that highlighted the need for more empirical evidence on everything related to youth unemployment.

In Europe, there are a number of well organised groups. The PES to PES dialogue programme is conducted under the umbrella of the European Commission, which sponsors various activities and offers encouragement to all the public employment services in the European Union and in the countries that are about to join the European Union. It conducts many peer reviews a year, selecting particular topics on which to focus. I deal quite closely with those organisations in a number of ways, including through the World Association of Public Employment Services. They are the institutions that play a key role in implementation of many of the labour market measures. They are always a good source of comparative data—which is not always scientifically gathered; sometimes it is more anecdotal—and of instances of good practice.

I know that you have done a great deal of research and consultation on this issue already, so you might have come across some of those organisations’ websites. However, if you have not, I would be more than happy to share them with you, through the person who contacted Laura Brewer on behalf of your committee.

Thank you. That brings us to the end of this part of the meeting. I thank Donna Koeltz and Laura Brewer for sharing their expertise in, and their insights into, this important issue.

10:57 Meeting suspended.

11:07 On resuming—