Enterprise and Culture Committee, 05 Dec 2006

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Official Report 338KB pdf

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“Workforce Plus” and “More Choices, More Chances”

Item 2 is the Scottish Executive's "Workforce Plus—an Employability Framework for Scotland" and "More Choices, More Chances: A Strategy to Reduce the Proportion of Young People not in Education, Employment or Training in Scotland". Before we have a round-table discussion, we will have a presentation from Lizzy Burgess, who is a senior research specialist in enterprise and lifelong learning in the Scottish Parliament information centre.

Good afternoon. I will give a short presentation of about 10 minutes on the Scottish Executive's employability framework and NEET strategy. The presentation will highlight the key points in my research paper, which has been circulated to members and is available on the Scottish Parliament website. Copies of the Scottish Executive documents are also available for everyone to have a look through.

I will start by considering some of the key statistics relating to the labour market in Scotland. I will then provide a quick overview of the Scottish Executive's policies and finish by examining some of the key issues.

Employability is a term with a number of definitions. It is essentially about an individual's ability to gain, sustain and be successful in employment. NEET is an acronym that is used to describe people who are not in employment, education or training.

Economic activity is a measure of people who are active in the labour market, and includes people who are employed and who are unemployed. Between July and September 2006, the economic activity rate for people of working age was 79 per cent: 75 per cent were employed and 4 per cent were unemployed. Expressed in figures, 2,474,000 people were in employment and 131,000 people were unemployed.

Unemployment is often measured in two ways. Large-scale surveys use the International Labour Organization definition of unemployment, which refers to people who want a job, are looking for a job and are able to start work. Another way of measuring unemployment is to look at the number of people claiming unemployment-related benefits. In October 2006, 87,800 people were claiming jobseekers allowance. However, some commentators believe that those measures do not accurately represent unemployment levels. The graph in my presentation shows the employment level, the unemployment level using the ILO definition and the claimant count between 1999 and 2006.

"Economically inactive" refers to people who are neither in employment nor unemployed. Between July and September this year, 21 per cent of people of working age were classified as economically inactive. That group includes people who want a job but who have not sought work in the past four weeks; those who want a job and are seeking work but who are not available to start work; and those who do not want a job. The pie chart shows economic inactivity by reason. Most people classified themselves as long-term sick, looking after family and home, or a student.

As mentioned earlier, NEET is used to describe people who are not in employment, education or training, and is commonly used with reference to young people. In 2005, 36,000 16 to 19-year-olds were NEET, which is 14 per cent of that age group. The chart shows that, of the people who were NEET, 64 per cent were unemployed and 36 per cent were economically inactive.

The two sets of factors that increase the risk of a young person becoming NEET are educational underachievement and disaffection, and family disadvantage and poverty. The groups of young people who are most at risk of becoming NEET are carers; teenage parents; homeless people; people in care or care leavers; people with learning difficulties, disabilities or mental illness; people who misuse drugs or alcohol; and offenders. The proportion of young people who are NEET also varies by area, which suggests that location is a factor.

The Scottish Executive's employability framework and NEET strategy were developed under the wider closing the opportunity gap strategy, the aims of which are:

"To prevent individuals or families from falling into poverty … provide routes out of poverty for individuals and families; and … sustain individuals or families in a lifestyle free from poverty."

The closing the opportunity gap strategy has 10 targets. I will focus on the four that relate directly to employability:

"Target A: Reduce the number of workless people dependent on DWP benefits in Glasgow, North & South Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire & Inverclyde, Dundee, and West Dunbartonshire by 2007 and by 2010.

Target B: Reduce the proportion of 16-19 year olds who are not in education training or employment by 2008.

Target C: Public sector and large employers to tackle aspects of in-work poverty …

Target G: By 2007 ensure that at least 50% of all ‘looked after' young people leaving care have entered education, employment or training."

The targets that relate to health support for children in need, educational attainment, community regeneration, and increasing services in remote and disadvantaged areas are also related in some way to employability.

"Workforce Plus—an Employability Framework for Scotland" sets a target of helping just over

"66,000 individuals … to move from benefits to work"

and aims to do that by 2010. The Executive has focused on the places that are specified in closing the opportunity gap target A and has allocated just over £11 million to them. Despite its focus on the target areas, the intention is for the framework to have an impact throughout Scotland. The workforce plus strategy highlights a range of actions to create

"a coherent employability service for Scotland"

and proposes to do that

"By supporting the establishment of … local Workforce Plus partnerships …a National Workforce Plus Partnership … and … A Workforce Plus Team".

The Executive document "More Choices, More Chances: A Strategy to Reduce the Proportion of Young People not in Education, Employment or Training in Scotland" presents evidence to suggest that although more than 35,000 young people are NEET, only around 20,000 need additional support to enter the labour market.

"More Choices, More Chances" highlights

"seven NEET hotspot areas (Glasgow, West Dunbartonshire, North Ayrshire, East Ayrshire, Clackmannanshire, Inverclyde and Dundee)"

and sets out five key areas of activity for pre-16s, in which the focus is on improving

"the educational experience of all children";

post-16 opportunities, in which the focus is on improving services for those "who are already NEET"; financial incentives to ensure that learning is "a financially viable option"; support for young people; and joint commitment and action, the aim of which is to ensure clear leadership and joined-up working.

"More Choices, More Chances" proposes to build on national partnerships between the Scottish Executive, businesses and education leaders, such as the Smith group, to support local partnerships and establish a NEET delivery team to deliver policy and practice. Each year for two years, the NEET hotspot areas will each receive £400,000, with other local authority areas each receiving £75,000.

In the final section of my presentation, I will outline some of the key issues surrounding employability and the NEET group. I begin by highlighting some labour market projections. It is projected that there will be 969,000 job opportunities in Scotland between 2004 and 2014. Scotland's population is getting older, and the share of the population over the age of 65 is projected to increase from 19 per cent in 2004 to 23 per cent in 2024. The number of people of working age is projected to fall by 7 per cent between 2004 and 2031.

It is predicted that employment growth will continue to be strongest in jobs that require higher levels of skills and qualifications. The number of lower-skilled jobs is predicted to decline. Labour market policies mediate between supply and demand—people who are not employed and the availability of jobs, respectively. Some commentators suggest that there has been an over-emphasis on supply-side theories of unemployment and that there should be a shift to looking at demand through promoting relevant employment in high-unemployment areas.

Estimates of the number of young people who are NEET vary depending on the definition that is used and the age group in question. There is not an internationally recognised definition of NEET, which can make it difficult to make comparisons. For example, in Japan, NEET covers people between the ages of 15 and 24. Another problem with the definition of NEET is that it combines a range of groups from the disadvantaged to the more privileged, who are able to make choices about the ways in which they manage their lives. It has been suggested that focusing on NEET draws attention away from people in low-paid and less-skilled jobs. Many young people have jobs that they regard as temporary, which do not provide training or fail to make use of their skills.

On ownership and delivery of the Scottish Executive policies, people who are looking for work and young people who are NEET currently come into contact with a number of agencies and programmes. To put those policies into a European context, the European employment strategy aims to give direction to and ensure the co-ordination of employment policy priorities at a European Union level.

What are the next steps? Today, the committee will hold a round-table discussion on employability and NEETs. At the committee's meeting on 23 January, oral evidence will be taken from Malcolm Chisholm, the Minister for Communities, and Allan Wilson, the Deputy Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning. A paper based on those discussions will then be sent to the Executive for comment.

My presentation has been based on the research paper that I have circulated, which can also be found on the Scottish Parliament's website.

Thank you, Lizzy. That was very helpful and informative.

I have a couple of housekeeping matters to deal with. We have received apologies from Jamie Stone MSP, who will be late, and from Billy Clark of the Ferguslie league of action groups, who will not be able to join us due to a family bereavement.

It would probably be best if we began by introducing ourselves, after which I will open up the discussion. The purpose of the discussion is to inform the committee of the views of those around the table on the Executive's employability framework and NEET strategy. We want to know about any particular issues that we should raise with the Executive in the short term and any longer-term issues that should inform our legacy paper for our successor committee after the election in May.

Two years ago, the committee intended to undertake its own inquiry into an employability strategy, but that did not happen for various reasons, the main one being that we were waiting for the Executive's strategy. We felt that, once the Executive had published its strategy, the most appropriate time to hold an inquiry would be when the strategy had been up and running for some time, at which point we would be able to establish how well or otherwise the strategy was doing. We recognise the need to focus on this area, which is a high priority—if not the top priority—for all parties to address. This is, therefore, not an academic discussion to be put on the shelf; it is going to help to set the agenda for the next Parliament and our successor committee. I hope that it will also provide input to the Executive on its strategy.

Let us introduce ourselves, then I will open up the discussion. My name is Alex Neil MSP, and I am the convener of the committee.

I am the deputy convener.

I represent the West of Scotland for the SNP.

I work in external relations at Jobcentre Plus.

I am an independent consultant and I chaired the NEET work stream group.

I represent the Highlands and Islands, and I am vice-convener of the new cross-party group on NEETs.

I am the chief executive of YouthLink Scotland, which is the national youth work agency.

I am the chief executive of Aberdeen Foyer.

I am the director of the training and employment research unit at the University of Glasgow.

I work for Communities Scotland, where I am in charge of a team called learning connections, which covers community learning and development, policy advice to Malcolm Chisholm, adult literacy and numeracy, and community engagement development matters.

I am a member of the committee.

I am the head of skills and learning at Scottish Enterprise, which covers all the national training programmes, workforce development and Careers Scotland.

I represent North East Scotland and I am a member of the committee.

I am the chief executive of the Wise Group.

I am the manager of Fairbridge in Scotland.

I represent North East Scotland and I am a member of the committee.

I am the head of support and development and children's services in Stirling Council.

The others who are sitting at the table are the official reporters and the committee clerks, who are employed by the Parliament. Stephen Imrie, our clerk, is not here today, so Douglas Thornton, the senior assistant clerk, is standing in for him.

Alan McGregor has many years of experience in the field. What do you think are the key issues that need to be addressed? What are your comments on the Executive's strategy?

That is very unfair. You probably know my age better than most people, Alex, as you are about three weeks younger than me.

In broad terms, the strategy is excellently put together and the documentation is well researched and has a good evidence base. The strategy is good at identifying problems, issues and mechanisms for going forward. I do not have any particular problem with the NEET strategy. The questions that I have are—as with all strategies—about the effective implementation of the strategy. I am currently working with a small number of localities that are trying to put together their action plans for dealing with the NEET group. What follow are some of the issues that are emerging from that work.

First, it is not always 100 per cent clear who is responsible for the NEET strategy within a locality. Is it the community planning partnership, the local authority education department, Careers Scotland, somebody else or a mixture of those bodies? I am not sure that it is the responsibility of the Executive, although a clearer steer or an underlining of responsibility would help. Lots of things do not happen in economic development in Scotland because no one takes responsibility for them locally. So, my first issue is the need for a clear allocation of responsibility for implementing the strategy.

My second issue relates to the first. As Lizzy Burgess's excellent presentation demonstrated, the young folk are a diverse group. Within that group are young people with many problems and issues who are in contact with a range of different agencies. Who is joining up the work at a local level? If a youngster has issues with homelessness, drug addiction and basic skills, they may be dealing independently with a number of different agencies. How can we join that up more effectively? I am not sure that the process has been properly thought through. It would help if, within a locality, an individual organisation had a clear responsibility for making that happen.

My third issue is that a large number of youngsters are not effectively engaged. What mechanisms exist for creating more effective engagement with those young people and maintaining it, so that we can progress them towards education, employment and training?

My fourth issue is that we need to ensure that, when we get young people to engage, we have a decent offer for them. That is the case in some localities. I heard yesterday about a vocational training programme that Glasgow social work department is running, which has a good quality support mechanism to deal with some of the issues that arise from not being engaged—for example, issues to do with reliability—by providing support and mentoring. However, I am not sure that there are many decent offers around Scotland.

The fifth and final point is about the targets for the NEET group, which were mentioned in the presentation. One of them is on care leavers and is to be introduced in 2007, and another is on reducing the proportion of young people who are in the NEET group and is to come in in 2008. Those dates are not far away. We need to inject more realism into the target-setting process, because we have an awful lot to do to organise at the local level, which is where all the work will happen. Progress will be slower than politicians and the rest of us would like to think. It is better to have realistic targets that there is a fair chance of meeting than to have targets that are too stretching, as that creates cynicism about them.

I am sorry for going on too long, convener, but that is a start.

To put your question back to you, in your experience, which organisations are normally in the best position to take the lead on the issue and to knock heads together locally?

Ideally, community planning partnerships would do that, because they bring together the full set of service delivery organisations that have a role. However, the cohesion, integration and authority of community planning partnerships vary throughout Scotland. Ideally, responsibility would lie with community planning partnerships, as they deal with pre and post-school issues and a wide spectrum of services.

I think that Lillias Noble wants to come in on that.

No; I was just paying attention, but I am happy to say something. Communities Scotland works to support the community planning partnership process and to ensure that people contribute effectively across a range of provision. We agree that the partnerships are variable, as one would expect, given that there are 32 different areas, but where they are working well they are by far our best hope of integrating services that have traditionally not pulled together in the ways that are needed to tackle an intractable problem that we face with young people in Scotland. We are all committed to trying to do something about it.

Community learning and development partnerships feed into community planning, which is where my territory cuts in. There is a lot to be said for the focused work that is beginning to be targeted on young people through community learning and development. Never mind that they are hard to reach; they need to be caught and we need to find attractive programmes, such as the one to which Alan McGregor referred, that will help them to want to work with the adults whose job it is to make the strategy effective. It is tricky to expect the young people in the NEET group to respond to the main march down the middle that works for the bulk of youngsters. We need to think about more specific, creative and individually focused alternatives for those young folk, because the approach will not work otherwise.

I found both speakers' comments useful. Yesterday, I was at the annual general meeting of CVS Fife, at which partnership was alternatively defined as the suppression of mutual loathing to attract external funding. I want to throw this question at all the witnesses: to what extent are the partnership working and drive that have been mentioned the suppression of that mutual loathing, mistrust or differing imperatives to achieve the outcome? Can we also talk about the practical difficulties and experience, and about how we might avoid reinventing the wheel? Some of the work that has proved most effective has been the post-NEET or post-event mentoring and support for individuals. That is time consuming and expensive, and the length of time for which it is required varies from individual to individual. Has that work been built into the strategy? If not, how can it be built in and what guarantees can be put in place that the money will not simply keep being spent on the few lucky people who get such support?

I have a few comments on the earlier conversation and on Christine May's comments. We have all been involved in partnerships over the years, which we could describe on a scale ranging from complete failure to complete success. The strategy gives us a renewed opportunity to revisit the partnerships and to think about how successful they are. We need to look for several common themes. We must acknowledge that we are all pulling in different directions. I would not put it as strongly as saying that we need to bury hostility to make progress, although I understand Christine May's point and I have been in partnerships in which that has been the case. However, in my more recent experience, I have found a real will and desire to make partnerships work.

In my view, there is not a lack of resources or organisational time to deliver and implement strategies to support individuals, but too much time is used in non-productive areas. I pick up on Alan McGregor's point—there is a lack of clarity about where responsibility lies. Community planning partnerships are an option, but unless they have the authority to discharge the responsibility, it is difficult for them to do so.

I was on Christine May's patch yesterday when I visited Thomson House at Lauder College. The outreach centre there deals with the get ready for work programme. I have visited a number of get ready for work training providers and placements to get a sense of what is working and what is not. We evaluated the programme recently. Some parts of it are successful and high performing, but other parts are not performing so well. At Thomson House, I saw an innovative approach to dealing with a set of clients. There is a huge range of issues to deal with, not just in the centre but when clients are on placements with employers and, more important, in relation to what happens to clients beyond then. There is a successful extended support package.

The evaluation of the get ready for work programme shows that there are still too many question marks over the tracking and longitudinal assessment of the sustainability of that investment in individuals. About 20 per cent of people on the programme have been there before. That means that 80 per cent of them do not come back, which is good, but 20 per cent is a significant number of people. What is happening to them? Are they not sustaining positive progress? Do we need to do more to support them in the workplace when they leave the programme? Are we ensuring that the right number of youngsters progress to the skillseekers programme or to modern apprenticeships, which offer good opportunities?

It is important for us to know and understand what happens to clients when they leave the system, because we need sustainability. It is not just people's initial entry to the labour market that is important. Low-paid, low-skilled workers are more vulnerable, and they fall out of the labour market more quickly, so we need to consider how we enable them to progress to sustainable opportunities.

My question leads on from Charlene O'Connor's remarks on engagement with people after they have been through training courses. We talked about the ways in which voluntary and public sector organisations can work together to tackle the issue. That is part of the strategy, but I would be interested to hear more about how groups engage with employers, about the initial contact that is made to try to drive people in the NEET group into work, and about continuing engagement. The Smith group was set up at the national level, but what more can be done at the grass roots to engage with employers?

I will pick up on a couple of points. On Christine May's question about aftercare, one of the most useful and interesting things in the employability framework is the analysis of how much money goes into employability. An estimated £500 million a year is spent on employability in Scotland and the framework document contains a helpful diagram that tries to show where that money goes. If we assume that there is a pipeline from the point of engagement to the point at which people go into work and are sustained in employment, the current pattern of spending is such that there is a huge spike in the middle, representing the time immediately before people get into work.

Traditionally, our funding mechanisms have rewarded people for crossing the line but we have not cared much about how long people stay on the other side of that line or what happens to them after the initial period of 12 weeks or whatever. As we all know, we have an environment in which people tend to be recycled around the system. For example, some 20 per cent of young people on the get ready for work programme will go through the programme a second time. We need to tackle more effectively the question of how we can get things to stick better so that outcomes are sustained.

One aspiration with the strategy is to try to smooth out the curve and flatten the spike. That obviously means more work at the front end on engagement, but it also means more work at the back end. One issue that we considered under the NEET work stream is that we cannot offer aftercare as a blanket service to every young person. Not everybody needs it and not everybody wants it. Even when young people with the greatest support needs—young offenders are the classic example—get into work, they often do not want someone from their offending project constantly contacting their employer to check whether everything is going okay. They want to move on. It is more important for them to know how to call on support when appropriate.

We are at relatively early stages of trying to get smarter in understanding the problems and applying solutions. Underneath that are some of the issues that have already been raised about better longitudinal understanding of the client group. For example, we have no school leaver destinations figures for young people with learning disabilities. We do not know what happens to them after school and they are not included in the data, so we have no baseline on or understanding of how far forward they are moving. There are other NEET sub-groups whose movements we do not know nearly enough about.

Both documents are hugely helpful, but they are just a starting point in what has to be a major culture shift across the country in getting far better use of what are significant resources.

I want to pick up a couple of points. I approach the subject from a service provider's point of view. We provide a range of employability and learning services at a local level, including a clear progression route for young people, from early engagement in learning—not necessarily employability—to help them become accustomed to making the life choices that were mentioned in the presentation, through to employer engagement.

Richard Baker asked how we engage employers. We have spoken directly to employers, and we offer two focused programmes. One relates to the construction industry and is supported through Jobcentre Plus, and in the second we have worked with the oil and gas sector on not the high-level but the low-skilled jobs. There are major skills shortages in the oil and gas sector. There are 40 years left to run, and there are still holes to plug. We have gone directly to employers locally, and that has worked for us.

From a provider's point of view, it has been difficult to manage the clear progression routes that we offer. We are trying to join things up locally, but the procurement arrangements that we have to enter into in tapping into the funding streams are mind blowing. If something smarter could happen with procurement arrangements, that would make it much easier for me to deliver effective services.

I have a few comments. First, we have missed some tricks at the sharp end—the engagement end—as there is little recognition in any of the literature or reports of the role that youth work can play in engaging the young people whom we are talking about. Youth work plays a major role, but it could have an even bigger role in making the first contact with young people on their terms. As careers officers will tell you, young people are often off the radar. An awful lot do not attend school or go to careers interviews, and many have complex needs, so we need to find new and better ways of contacting and keeping in touch with them.

The sad thing is that we know before they leave school that they are going to enter that scenario, so we need to up our game in involving local community learning and development partnerships to get both statutory and voluntary youth work providers more involved in the game.

Some excellent detached youth work is taking place in some parts of the country. Those workers contact the people that the NEET strategy is geared at, but as yet no linkage has been made between that work and the strategy. Including phrases such as "youth work" and "detached youth work" in a revised strategy would give the sector a way in and let community partnerships know what youth work could provide.

There is also a massive difficulty with youth literacies. In collaboration with Communities Scotland, we have done some research that highlights new and innovative ways of getting young people to a level at which they have half a chance of engaging with a college or an employer. It is not even a case of those young people being on the first rung of the ladder; a lot of them are two or three rungs off the ladder, in a sense. There is no quick fix, and if we are really to tackle those who are most in need, we have to start further back. As Eddy Adams said, we need to front-load that work in terms of resource and give it a reasonable amount of time to succeed. Youth work seems to have been missed off the agenda somewhere along the line.

I would like to follow up on what Ken Milroy and Jim Sweeney have said about early engagement. I am a former teacher, and I think that we should be engaging with kids at school a lot earlier. I have experienced some schools that have provided kids with good vocational opportunities, and some that have not. Schools have a major truancy problem at the moment, and a lot of the kids who are truanting are kids who probably have particular skills but who are bored and frustrated with academic activity. If we can get job providers into the schools at the earliest possible stage, and if we can tackle those kids who are just not interested in academia but who would probably be good plumbers and joiners, we can engage them so that they have the momentum when they leave school to get out of the NEET trap.

I support what Ken Milroy said about employer engagement. Jobcentre Plus Scotland obviously engages directly with employers, and we have had some of our best successes when we have worked with our partners or providers to engage with employers to fill their vacancies. The biggest barrier that we face is employers' perceptions of people in the NEET group, older workers or people with a disability; employers often have preconceived ideas about or perceptions of what someone can or cannot do. We work closely with employers to overcome those perceptions, providing awareness workshops and then moving on to a pre-recruitment initiative in which the employer is closely involved with candidates, who take part in a pre-recruitment workshop. We decide with the employer what the pre-recruitment workshop will consist of and the employers decide what they want to get out of it. They engage with individuals, participate all the way through the course and then offer job opportunities or work trials at the end of it, so that our customers can go in and see what they can actually do.

Jim Sweeney and I are singing from the same song sheet. Fairbridge Scotland is a youth organisation that works with the hardest-to-reach young people, so we are involved in early intervention with the 13 to 15-year-olds whom Dave Petrie mentioned. The young people with whom we are working are definitely at risk of falling into the NEET group, so we try to intervene in a way that brings them on and gives them more skills, which gives them opportunities that they did not have previously because they were not succeeding in education.

We also work with the 16 to 25-year-olds who are firmly in the NEET group. The youth organisation approach is an intervention that I would definitely like to be given greater recognition as having something to do with moving young people on in the whole employability continuum. Young people who are not engaging in mainstream opportunities or education need an opportunity to show that they can become plumbers, for example, and that they can try and taste, turn up on time, achieve goals and gain accreditation and work skills. Those are the activities that Fairbridge tries to provide, as a first-step organisation, before moving the young people on to a training organisation or further education. I would like to see an awful lot of investment in the early stages for those young people who will never access mainstream education because they do not have the personal, social, life or work skills to be able to do so. They need support, and that is what Fairbridge tries to offer young people. The successes are good: young people engage and move on.

We definitely provide the first step, but the value of such youth work is perhaps underestimated. No stigma is attached to coming to Fairbridge—the young people do not come to us as a drugs agency or an employment agency—but in the youth work that we do the young people learn, by stealth, the skills that they require to move on to the second step.

The Wise Group works more with older people outside the labour market, so I have more experience of people in that group. However, for them and for people in the NEET group, the continuum—or pipeline—of support that Eddy Adams mentioned is very similar. I agree that we need to engage more with people who are at one end of that pipeline and work more with those who are at the other end. Let me make just a couple of comments.

First, from the employability assessments that we carry out when people come to the Wise Group, we know that more than 80 per cent have two or more barriers to work—they are usually long-term unemployed and may have been referred by Jobcentre Plus or may be on incapacity benefit. Often, the individuals have complex issues that are not easily resolved. Therefore, when we resolve one problem, for example by helping the person to gain skills, that does not necessarily mean that they will be able to operate successfully in the labour market. By barriers to work, I mean things such as homelessness, health issues, finance issues, alcohol or drug dependency or being an ex-offender.

Secondly, I must express my general frustration with the inability of all our organisations to replicate things that work—I joined the Wise Group fairly recently, so that comment is based on my experience of other economic and social regeneration organisations. We have a mania for looking for innovation all the time when we should ask ourselves why something that works for Fairbridge cannot be replicated elsewhere. When things work, we need to work out what their essential ingredients are and replicate them, license them and repeat them. Generally speaking, I think that we see many good examples of things that work but, somehow or other, we just seem unable to replicate them.

That links to my third point, which is about the need for partnership, which Christine May mentioned. There is no doubt that we need to work better in partnership. If we can share information and be less protective, I think that we will be more able to replicate successful projects.

Fourthly, we should accept that working with employers is difficult. As my colleague from Jobcentre Plus said, there are good examples of working with employers, but we need to overcome some prejudices. I think that, collectively, we have not put enough effort into that. We do not genuinely listen to what employers want as much as we should. We need to try to fix that. Some of the Wise Group's programmes that target particular sectors are working extremely well. For example, we offer a relatively short-term training course that we developed with the national health service in Glasgow and which has a high success rate of getting people into work and retaining them in work. The NHS is a good employer and, when it gets someone it can work with, it will help the person to progress. We need to do more of that. We need to work with employers in developing programmes that meet the needs both of employers and of the long-term unemployed.

Finally, that example of the NHS shows the need to develop in-post employment support for people. When we did research to follow up on more than 1,000 people who had come through the Wise Group, we found that the principal reason why people fall out of work is that a financial crisis occurs once they are in work and come off benefit. Often, the reason is that local authorities and others come to collect their debts after people come off benefit. People also think that they have lots of money so they go out and buy things without realising how much debt they are getting into. The problem is usually financial, although other problems can also arise. Providing a small amount of help at a key point can be important in keeping people in work. We need to help people build on their skills and on other things that will retain them in work. We also need to help them progress so that they can move away from an entry-level job. Getting in at the minimum wage will not suit everybody, so we need to help them get beyond that relatively quickly so that they can sustain a job.

I want to pick up on the points that were made about how school education fails so many pupils when they are in their early teens, which is a critical age in their development. Having visited Fairbridge and seen the work that it does, I think that we are missing a trick when we allow pupils to be excluded. Excluding pupils is so counterproductive.

We hear about the amount of money that is being put into working with excluded pupils. Much more of those funds needs to be put into supporting people who have been excluded or who truant, because we are not addressing the reasons why they have been excluded or truant. We need to focus on prevention. I recognise that this is the Enterprise and Culture Committee, but should we develop partnerships with the Education Committee? To an extent, both committees should focus on the issue.

My other point applies to the other end of the process—employment. Not enough focus is placed on the supported employment that social enterprises can offer. Much of their ethos is about helping people into work in a supportive and flexible way. Their ethos is about more than profit. They can address some of the issues and take on people who do not know how to turn up for work in the morning. I am a board member of such a company, which tries to get people from open prison and people with mental health problems back into work. We know what the issues are, but we need much more focus on social enterprises, which can provide the flexibility to get people on the stepping-stone.

The range of comments around the table shows the complexity of the situation. The partnership arrangements in Stirling Council, where I work, have operated since 2001 through compass for life, which brings together many of the partners that people around the table have talked about—the voluntary sector, the statutory sector, youth justice services and education services. The only way to tackle the problem is to acknowledge that different groups of young people have different needs. If intervention is to be effective, it must start when young people are still at school. The Executive's strategy tries to address that and to encourage partnerships to consider young people from 14 onwards.

Our partnership has identified a few issues of late, some of which have been mentioned. Eddy Adams spoke about keeping in touch with young people. We recognise that we need to share information much more effectively. For example, different organisations that are trying to provide support may find that young people have moved on from a previous address—that is a practical issue in relation to making contact. We are exploring whether we can use Executive funding to create a single shared information database for young people. Funding for a database through Careers Scotland has been discussed, but much money has been invested in local authorities developing a single customer base throughout Scotland. Current levels of investment need to be investigated, so that the Executive can make the right choice about where to invest in the future to build on what is happening rather than create something new.

A point was made about contact with employer groups. In the past couple of weeks, we have met staff from the Executive's implementation team, and we pleaded for some input from somebody from the Smith group, because we think that we could be more effective at developing links at the employer level. That would mean that, when we provided training for young people, we could gear it up to live job opportunities.

We must realise that young people have individual needs. Young people in rural communities can have a different set of opportunities from young people in cities, so we need to provide more flexible training opportunities that can be individualised and to create one-to-one contacts that will see young people through. We have good examples of young people being captured through the youth justice service, for example. They work their way through alternative curriculum programmes in schools to employment and training opportunities. However, that approach requires a significant investment of time and energy from staff and it requires people to work across all the agencies and to put young people at the centre rather than just thinking about what their individual agency does.

What struck me as I listened to what people were saying was how little things have changed. About 20 years ago, in the late 1980s, I worked for a company that dealt with adults who had numeracy and literacy difficulties and helped the long-term unemployed to get back into work. Two of the fundamental problems that were faced then have come up in today's discussion. Before anyone spoke, I had written down that churn was a problem, by which I meant that people go round and round the system and never get off the merry-go-round. I think that it was Eddy Adams who mentioned the spending spike, whereby the money is always paid at the point at which people have stayed in the same place for 12 weeks. The aim of many organisations is to get past that date.

It is rather disappointing that, 20 years later, we are still discussing the same problems. It struck me then, and it still strikes me now, that after young people have been taken on by an organisation, have gone on a programme and have done well and been motivated, two things tend to cause problems when they come out and go into employment. I agree that low-paid employment is a financial demotivation after the motivation of courses or pre-employment training. We still have a fundamental problem with the benefit and taxation system, which does not deal with the wall that young people all hit when they go into employment, especially when the employment is low paid.

In addition, when I was a local authority manager for a number of years, I was struck by the fact that the expectations of the young people whom we took on, particularly those who had been unemployed for a long time, were markedly different from the reality of employment. I am not blaming anyone for that, but I think that many courses still do not prepare young people for the reality of employment—the getting up every day and the work that is involved. There is a difference between what employment is actually about and the idealised view of what it is about, and there are still a number of issues that we must tackle. It is unfortunate that similar problems are being experienced today as were being experienced 20 years ago.

I have a long list of people who want to come back in.

I have a brief point specifically on expectations of, and attitudes to, work. Like Alan McGregor, we are doing work in local areas throughout the country where some of the action planning is being carried out. An interesting point emerged from a workshop in Falkirk a few weeks ago, at which some head teachers discussed the fact that increasing numbers of young people were much less enthusiastic about going on work experience than was the case 10 years or so ago. The head teachers said that when they had come into education, even the young people who were less engaged were always pretty keen to go on work experience because it was seen as a rite of passage and an important part of the whole school experience. The observation was made that not only are young people now less keen to go on work experience, but when they go on it they will often say, "I am not sweeping the floors and making the tea for a week." It is also the case that pupils' parents do not want their kids to go on work experience. We had a discussion about what that meant and what work experience was about.

To most of us, work experience is about exposing young people to new experiences, taking them out of their own environment and removing them from their comfort zone. It is not about giving a company cheap labour for a week. Anyone who has had a young person on work experience will know that it is not something that is to be taken on lightly if it is to be a good experience for both parties.

In some local discussions, people are asking whether schools are using work experience as effectively as they could. We know from recent research by the Executive that by the time young people get to sixth year, 83 per cent of them will have had a part-time job and will have been exposed to the workplace. The young people who do not get that experience are the ones who face the biggest barriers and who are furthest from the labour market. There is a range of reasons why some young people tend not to get access to work experience. They might be more difficult to place or might be worried that they will screw up. There are all sorts of reasons why someone might not get to the front of the queue.

At the moment, those young people are going out to their second or third choice. They are not particularly interested in doing work experience and employers may be reluctant to have them. The youngsters who need the experience more than others do not get it.

The issue of connectedness with education has been raised. A number of activities within education that are not off-site or out of school but are part and parcel of the core curriculum could be re-engineered in some way to target them more effectively at young people who are at risk of becoming NEET—we know who they are long before they turn 16. We must be cleverer at using those activities. Other interventions in schools could support the skills for work programme.

Schools are doing many good things, often in partnership with voluntary organisations such as Fairbridge Scotland and others that are represented around the table. However, I have not been to one area where anyone has a clear map of what all the schools are doing. Some schools are very entrepreneurial and are buying additional resources from the Prince's Trust and products such as Careers Scotland's on track programme. Those are good products that work well, but it is all a bit of a mish-mash, as no one knows which school is offering what. When we try to piece together what is happening, even in authorities with only eight secondary schools, no one has the full picture, so it is not easy to get a clear understanding of what works and does not work, and how we can build on measures that we know are effective—the point that Laurie Russell made. We tend to go around in circles.

I would like to comment on the issues of employer engagement and sustainability. I am helping to prepare a bid from the Glasgow welfare to work forum to the Department for Work and Pensions, as part of the strategy to reduce worklessness in the city. An employer engagement sub-group is looking at the issue.

One difficulty is that much employment in the private sector is in small and medium-sized enterprises. It is hard for SMEs to engage with this agenda, because having a small workforce makes them more risk averse, more careful about whom they hire and less likely to take someone to whom risk is attached, as they perceive it. They do not really have the human resources systems and department managers to manage such situations, if there are problems. In those circumstances public sector employers must adopt a much more proactive stance. One of the more encouraging developments in the recent past is that a number of local authorities have begun to make commitments in relation to the NEET group. They have set targets for taking people on and putting a certain number of them into specific departments. The health service and our colleges and universities are also major employers and have roles to play in this arena.

We need to remember that we do not know exactly how many of the folk in the NEET group are young people who are seriously disadvantaged. We are talking about a small number of people relative to the adult working-age population. If local authorities and other major public sector employers offered good-quality training places and employment, that contribution could go some way towards making inroads into the problem. We need to set an example to employers more generally.

On sustainability, Eddy Adams is dead right to highlight the spiking of spending in the pre-employment stage. I have written that we do not provide enough aftercare. The best aftercare is provided before people go into work. Laurie Russell mentioned that financial problems are one reason why people do not sustain work. We have just finished an evaluation of Tesco's move into Pollok in Glasgow. It provided a bespoke training programme, with the guarantee of a job. However, at the last minute all sorts of financial problems emerged. They were down to issues such as monthly payment—when people came off benefit, they had to wait three weeks before they got any money. Why do we not anticipate that? Why do we not have systems in place to fix it? Why do we have to wait until someone is in the job and jacks it in after three weeks because they are short of cash and are experiencing all sorts of problems as a result? That is not an aftercare issue—it is a planning issue. Our failure to tackle it is very disappointing.

We have a spike in spending during the pre-employment stage because that is what we ask people to do. As public sector funders we say, "Get folk into a job and we will pay you after they have been there for eight or 13 weeks."

If we were paying more in relation to people who were still employed six months, nine months or a year later—although Laurie Russell might not like that, as it might cause cash-flow problems for the Wise Group and other organisations—employers would be more careful about matching people to appropriate and sustainable opportunities and anticipating the difficulties of re-entering employment. That is the approach that the DWP is examining in relation to Jobcentre Plus contracting in its city strategy. In many ways, you get what you pay for in this world. We have to be a lot smarter in terms of how we contract people to provide these services.

The stuff that I have read recently suggests that the effective marginal rate of taxation for people who are coming off benefit and going into work is still, in some cases, as high as 80 or 90 per cent.

If you go into a minimum wage job and have a personal allowance, you start paying tax at £5,500 or so a year, so if you work full time on the minimum wage, your earnings will be roughly £10,000 a year and you will pay tax on about £4,500 of it. Further, your council tax benefit and most of your housing benefit will be withdrawn. Similarly, you might no longer qualify for free prescriptions, dental care, eye care and so on.

There is a more fundamental issue than cash flow for people who go from weekly payments to monthly payments. At the weekend, Frank Field suggested that one way in which to overcome that issue is to keep people on benefit for their first year in employment: it would make the transition period a lot easier and ensure that, when people come off benefits, they are well into the cycle of employment, the tax system and so on. What do you think about that?

You are correct: the financial offer to jobless people could be improved. There is no doubt about that. Secondly, as Laurie Russell has already said, as soon as someone starts work, the various people who are owed money descend. Thirdly, we have a miserable record on housing benefit: there are shocking case studies of people's lives being virtually ruined when they move into work because the local authority screws up their housing benefit, which leaves them with massive debts.

If you speak to a large number of jobless people—which we do as part of our research—you will discover that the killer is not the fact that they think that they will not be that much better off but their fear about what will happen if the job does not work out. They are poor but have a stable income—they get their rent paid and receive various other benefits. If their job does not work out, how quickly will they get back to a stable income? Will they get back to the same level of benefit that they had before? They are told that they will, but they do not trust the system. Fear is a major factor in people not leaving the benefits system.

Frankly, most people want to work. Thus it has always been, but over a period of years, as a result of a variety of things that have happened with regard to sustained long-term unemployment, we have moved to a different place. We need to improve the financial offer to people who are moving from welfare to work and to give them cast-iron guarantees that, if the job does not work out, their families will not be at risk.

What kind of message would that give people who are in a position to go straight into the workforce, without going on benefits first? Might people who are looking at finding a low-wage job and who will have to live on that low wage—which we want to ensure is raised—see an incentive in going on benefits before going into employment? They would be guaranteed a higher income than they would get if they went straight into the workforce.

I was not talking about an income guarantee—

But the convener was, I think.

I was quoting Frank Field.

We have to be careful that we do not create a disincentive to work by making it better for people to be on benefits before they go into work. Part of me thinks that, sometimes, our society creates that disincentive.

I worked with a generation of people who had become accustomed to their parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters not working. It has become a way of life. That is the real challenge: how do we make people realise that work is something we do? It is a positive choice. It is something people should seek to do automatically when they leave school. People should not get into the cycle of thinking, "Education disnae matter; mother and father have done all right by not working so I don't need to bother."

The old-fashioned part of me is asking what happened to community education. Who outside the voluntary sector is doing community-based learning? Where is out-of-school work with kids who are truanting being done other than by the voluntary sector? Where is the local authority-based commitment to young people and communities that is about community empowerment and learning? I do not see it happening in my patch. Where are the community-based courses that got young people who had left school with few qualifications into learning and that gave them the skills and confidence to go into further education?

Charlene O'Connor, I will bring you in to answer that.

We are part of that, through the £22 million get ready for work programme and skillseekers level 2. Some modern apprenticeship provision would also tackle that for our client group.

I am less up to speed with what is happening in the local community beyond Scottish Enterprise's portfolio, but I am sure that my colleagues around the table will be able to help.

The get ready for work programme tries to get young people engaged in quite innovative ways. Since I took up my post I have been reviewing the skills and learning portfolio for Scottish Enterprise and I have seen some excellence. We are in danger of becoming quite negatively focused. There are some absolutely fabulous examples of young people achieving success. I am not saying for a second that everything is joined up effectively: the £22 million is not being used as effectively as it could be. I still have to deal with young people who have problems that are way beyond the capabilities of the get ready for work programme, which then looks like a sticking plaster that is not working.

We need to consider how referral between the various bits of provision happens, including what happens earlier on, so that when young people come on the programme they are on the get ready for work route and not something else.

The youth guarantee question also has to be considered. I hear about pregnant girls being referred to the get ready for work programme because they are guaranteed a training place. How sensible is that? They are on the programme because of the financial incentive, because they have no other options and because that route will give them some financial support. Those are all very important reasons, but the support part is not working particularly well. That is another set of issues that have to be tackled.

One of the things that is coming through loud and clear for me is how effective employer engagement, aftercare and sustainability happen in the local dimension. Alan McGregor made a good point about the SMEs. We think that SMEs will have problems accessing support for MAs, skillseekers or the get ready for work programme. Training suppliers are helping to balance the risk that companies face. They are giving tasters for employers and young people; it works both ways. Not many people will take young people on for purely altruistic reasons—they have a business to run—but they might give a young person work experience in a minimised risk situation. The company might not end up taking on that individual, but the experience is serious preparation for future work or placements. That kind of work is really important and it can be done, although it is complex.

We need to examine the local connections and see how the referral process is working. We are all investing a lot in our individual parts of the programme, but it has to move seamlessly with the person at the middle of it. We cannot be worrying more about where our funding goes; what is right for the person on the programme is the key to success.

One of the services that we operate is supported accommodation for young people. It is a concern that consideration of employability is not part of that service, although we try to offer it. Most of the young people who come to us are on non-work related benefits. We are successful at motivating them and able to move them towards employment.

One of the steps that we always try to take is to look at the skills agenda that was mentioned in today's presentation and work with the local further education college. There are some disincentives, particularly for people in supported accommodation, connected to benefits and the 16-hour rule. We are not getting that right. To help inform the committee's paper to the Executive, I suggest that there need to be good working relationships to produce benefits reform because benefits are not working for the group of young people with whom we deal.

Karen Gillon said that community involvement gives young people the opportunity to learn skills through community or youth work organisations. Our experience of the get ready for work programme is that there is a lack of core programmes that support the ad hoc life skills element for those young people. There is no continuity of contract after young people have followed the programme for some time. That is mainly because of the time limit—the young people have to do the ad hoc life skills part of the programme and get a job within six months. Some of the targets limit organisations that can provide that support, possibly through the get ready for work programme. However, it seems to have fallen by the wayside somewhat.

I am sure that Karen Gillon is absolutely right about the invisibility of good-quality work in community learning and development in her area. That is disappointing, but it might be helpful if I tell you what we are trying to do nationally to make such work more visible and to ensure that resources are going in the right direction.

The situation is not perfect everywhere. The heyday was in Sir Kenneth Alexander's day, in 1975, when really good community education work was developed. Perhaps we have lost our visibility in more recent years. However, £120 million a year plus about £10 million or £12 million on the adult literacy side is still going into community learning and development through the grant-aided expenditure that local authorities receive.

Part of our job is to say, "Right, let's have some plans for community learning and development and see what work is meant to be prioritised." We are looking at achievement through learning for young people and adults, building community capacity and trying to make some of that work more visible.

Last year, for the first time in many years, we started trying to gather statistics on a crude and dirty basis, which is better than nothing at all. It was our first attempt and we said, "During this particular week in November, 89,000 youth work opportunities were accessed throughout Scotland." We had another such week this year, but I do not have the statistics for it. The figures are for just one week chosen randomly in one year. Loads of the 89,000 youth work opportunities were delivered by the voluntary sector because that is what their partnerships are all about—they are meant to disburse the resources equitably and fairly throughout the community learning and development partnerships that feed into community planning.

As an ex-teacher, I have great respect for our colleagues in Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education. When HMIE reported this year on the state of Scottish education, it included for the first time ever reports on what is happening in community learning and development. That was a great step forward for us. The reports contain a lot of interesting stuff about who HMIE spoke to and the kind of deprivation and disadvantage it looked at in its CLD inspections and programmes. HMIE said last year that given the context, the achievements in CLD against the three national priorities were "significant". Significant does not exactly set the heather on fire, but it is a start in raising visibility and ensuring that some of our work begins to cut home. There is more to report, but the minister may wish to say more about it when he comes to speak to the committee. I have given you a wee flavour of what we are trying to do.

That is all well and good. Over the years, community learning and development has moved on, but the point is that not all young people have access to youth work or to a youth worker's skills by a long chalk. That is particularly telling with respect to young people not in education, employment or training. Laurie Russell mentioned replicating things that work. I can point to several good examples of where things work—perhaps I will write to the committee about them. Rather than initiatives being sexy for three years and funding then disappearing, we should replicate them. We all have a problem with continuity.

Nine times out of 10 there will be a voluntary contract between a young person and a youth worker. The young person will be empowered. The youth worker is not a parent, police officer, teacher, social worker or person who runs a care home—they will have a different kind of relationship with the young person. Whether Fairbridge, the Prince's Trust or a local authority is providing youth work input, the young person will have more control over the results over time. The work can be very intensive or can be on and off.

I return to the idea that young people not in education, employment or training are not even on the radar. They do not go to school or engage with society in general; indeed, youth workers are among the few people who can regularly get in touch with them. It can take six months to get them to talk back and establish a relationship. We should listen to what those young people tell us. I refer to what Alan McGregor said. Older people will say what prevents them from going into employment and sustaining that employment. We must ask those young people the same questions and try to build their self-esteem so that we break the cycle, which Karen Gillon mentioned, in which families have not worked for three or four generations. We must put confidence and faith in a contact process with those young people; over time, we might then be able to crack the nut. However, there is no quick fix and things will not be cheap.

There is an issue that I want to raise later with Charlene O'Connor. The implications of the Scottish Enterprise budget debacle last year are beginning to affect training programmes in my area. The funding is certainly insufficient for the training programmes that are being run.

I do not want a discussion about Scottish Enterprise's budget crisis, but I will let Charlene O'Connor reply briefly to Karen Gillon's question.

I refute the idea that there are implications for the skills budget; that is not true. The skills budget has remained static this year. We have taken contracts down in areas that are not performing for us; I will not continue to work with training suppliers that are delivering zero output. We must ensure that individuals in the NEET client group or any other group have a fair chance of receiving high-quality provision. There have been slight reductions in some of the 19 to 24 skillseeker level 2 and adult modern apprenticeship programmes because they have not provided the right options for young people or for the employer base. However, the overall budget is probably around 1.7 per cent lower than it was last year.

I will not allow the matter to be discussed in detail; we must stay with the thrust of what we were discussing.

I will not say what I was going to say because it might continue the dialogue.

I have listened to what has been said about where youth work fits in and to what Charlene O'Connor said about the get ready for work programme. We did the national evaluation for that programme back in June and we have done a lot of local area mapping work as part of the NEET work. Several issues have arisen. One is that "employability" is a weaselly, unhelpful word.

People who work in youth work and addiction services may not think that what they do has anything to do with employability, because they think that employability is about getting folk into jobs. However, we must have a word, and we must ensure that people who have an important role to play in specialist services, particularly in proactively engaging with young people at the front end, see where they fit in. We must also understand where programmes that are run by the enterprise networks fit in.

One issue with get ready for work is that in a sense it started off being all things to all people. As a consequence, it is fair to say that there was confusion about exactly where it sat, what its function was and what it did and did not do. What it offered varied widely throughout the country.

Since the enterprise network introduced a target of 50 per cent positive outcomes, the trend has been towards selecting young people who are more likely to cross the finishing line that we talked about. That is all well and good in that it clarifies the position and solves part of the problem, but it raises questions about what happens to the piece of territory that get ready for work used to occupy in some parts of the country—gaps are now emerging. It is helpful that in the local area discussions on the NEET strategy, each of the 32 local area partnerships are looking at what they have on the ground, how it fits together and where there is duplication. Somebody said that duplication is bad and overlap is good. We want connectedness and we do not want big holes, but equally we do not want everybody to be providing the same thing.

I now come back to money, the spike and the other matters that we talked about at the beginning of the discussion. In some areas, many providers are bunched up in a little island in the middle, because that is traditionally where a lot of the money has been. There is now less money around for front-end engagement and at the back end. There is not as much for those aspects now as there was in the late 1970s and early 80s. We have not gone full circle, but we are revisiting what bits of the strategy we want to keep and what bits we want to change. There must be an informed local area discussion about what works, what does not work and where the provision fits in. We must also cover the legitimate role of the national programmes and ask where youth work, addiction services and the proactive work that organisations such as the Wise Group do with young offenders and groups that are more at risk, fit in.

The other comment that I will make—I suppose that it is a red light for me—is that it is easy when we talk about young people to get drawn into talking about the groups with the biggest problems. Another issue that came out of the work streams work was that many of the kids who end up being NEET are what we might call quietly disaffected at school. They do not appear on the radar, because they do not have huge issues and do not attract attention to themselves. They go through school almost unnoticed. With a little bit of help and support—massive intervention and investment is not required—they could go a lot further than they currently do. I throw that comment in as a weather warning. We must ensure that we do not overlook that group. Connectedness is fundamental to making the strategy work more effectively.

I will take Susan Deacon and Laurie Russell, but then I will have to wind the discussion up because we have other business.

I am conscious that I missed the earlier part of the discussion, but having caught the lion's share of it I am struck that although there has been much informative and helpful discussion of the substance, there have been relatively few references to the Executive's strategy. Unless the first part of the meeting was focused on that I would like to hear more—not least since we will speak to ministers about the issue—from folk about their views on where the Executive is at and to what extent the strategy is fit for purpose and is adding value.

The opening gambit was from Alan McGregor, who said that he thought that the strategy was about right. I sensed that nobody violently disagreed, albeit other aspects need to be added.

I was looking appealingly in your direction to get a steer as to what happened earlier, so I am grateful for your comments.

That takes me to my other question, which is that having listened to the discussion—I have listened to many other discussions on the subject and people around the table have been involved in many of them—what comes through is the human aspect of the issue and the many practical things that are being done or need to be done. I often find that difficult to equate with the grand strategy document; it can be difficult to make the connections. I know that the Executive's commitment is significant, but we waited a long time for big strategy documents that, to my mind, are quite far removed from the human and practical dimensions that people have shared with us in the discussion.

It would be helpful to know whether you are ticking the box and saying that you do not have a problem with the words or the shape of things. In the short time that we have left it would be useful to hear how the rhetoric will be translated into reality. An awful lot of you have talked about building on what has worked and reinventing the wheel, and you have said that we have been here before. I would like to hear about the how as well as the what.

That is a good point. The consensus early on was that the strategy is appropriate, well thought through and well constructed. The next stage—delivery—is critical. A theme of the discussion has been that we do not learn from and replicate good practice.

I am concerned about the expectation about numbers. I do not think that enough work has been done on that. In Glasgow in particular, some of the expectations are too far, too quick. We are unlikely to hit the targets on the percentage of people we get back into work within the timescale. Our crude calculation is that we would have to increase what we do by about two and half times to hit the target. It would be very difficult for us all to do that. We can increase what we do year on year, but not on that scale. We need to have a serious think about the numbers.

When we started more than 20 years ago, we invented something called the intermediate labour market. We thought that a group of people outside the labour market needed to do a bit of training, get work experience and understand what the world of work is like while getting paid a wage and receiving support to find work. We thought that during that period, those people should be involved in good quality community projects, starting with construction and housing work and moving on to landscaping and environmental work. At one stage we had 600 places for that kind of work throughout Scotland and the north-east of England, but that number has fallen. A lot of people need that kind of experience, which would not have to last a full year. They need help with getting a skill, putting it into practice and learning about the world of work.

One of the reasons the number of places has fallen relates to Ken Milroy's point about public procurement. We do not get a penny in core funding from any public agency; we have to seek funding from various contracts. The way public procurement works means that we are in competition with the private sector. I am not arguing against that, because it means that we have to be effective and deliver results in the same way that any organisation should, but no allowance is made for the fact that we are working with the hardest to help group of people. When we carry out an environmental improvement project, it is not with people who have skills—we are trying to give them the skills and teach them about the world of work. We are dealing with people who are on methadone or are causing difficulty for their supervisor.

We are going to have to be much smarter. The jargon for what happens is "mission drift", which means that we will start to drift away from saying that we will work with the hardest to help group, because we have to chase the money to survive. I hope that the city strategy in Glasgow and elsewhere will address that.

We have had a lot of discussions about employability, but we have spent very little time talking about ex-offenders. The Wise Group is involved in a couple of projects, which have not been made public, from which we might learn lessons about work with ex-offenders. Ex-offenders often face more barriers than anyone else, such as prejudice from employers who are not keen to employ them and, depending on the offence, prejudice within some of the organisations that work with them—I have come across a couple of cases of that in the past few weeks. We need to find ways of working with ex-offenders that will involve taking what we have talked about on employability a stage further, by working with the person and their issues.

The most horrific fact that I have learned in four months in the Wise Group is what happens when someone comes out of prison. The first people who meet them at the prison gate are the drug dealers, and the first place they see is the off licence. There is a vicious circle. If we do not get ex-offenders past those situations, the chances of their going back into the system are much higher. I heard yesterday about a United States project where people are met at the prison gate, as we are doing with life coaches, and brought into a situation where they can be worked with.

My final point is that we must treat ex-offenders more seriously. They are often the most difficult group to work with, and we sometimes just avoid them.

I have one tiny point, which takes me back to where I started on mentoring and support. The problem with most folk is that, like us all, they go home at 5 o'clock in the evening and do not start again until 9 o'clock in the morning. In my experience, mentoring and support is most often needed at 10 o'clock at night, at midnight or at 6 in the morning when someone has to go somewhere but their transport has not arrived. What do they do then? They drop out. Investing more funding in support at the ends of the day could make all the difference.

Unfortunately, I have to curtail the debate. I want to draw out some of the threads. If anybody violently disagrees with me and thinks that I have misunderstood their point, please feel free to say so.

We will talk to the minister, but the discussion has presaged work by our successor committee. We have spent roughly an hour and a half on the subject this afternoon, it took the Executive two or three years to develop the NEET strategy and the subject could be debated for much longer, but several threads have come out that are relevant both to the work that the committee will want to do in the immediate future and for our successor committee.

First, I sense that there appears to be general satisfaction with the strategy, but, as Alan McGregor said at the beginning, the key issue is how it is implemented. There seems to be a clear need for clarification and perhaps a decision about which organisations will take the lead. It was suggested that the community partnerships should take the lead at the local strategic level, but the lead in day-to-day delivery also needs to be determined, ideally in each area through the community partnership. There does not necessarily need to be the same pattern throughout the country.

The second major thread was about the £500 million that is spent specifically in this area each year in Scotland and the need to reprofile some of it to provide more of a continuum of support, in particular through earlier intervention and, where appropriate, more resources into aftercare. We picked up the message that the spike that Eddy Adams talked about needs to be evened out, probably on a symmetrical basis, to provide more of a continuum of support.

The third thread was about implementation, specifically the roles of groups such as Fairbridge and Youthlink and of youth development workers from agencies and at a local level. They need to be more involved in the implementation of the support provided, particularly to younger people. The Foyer is a good example.

The need for continuity was also mentioned, so that we do not do a complete change every time the three-year funding is up. There has to be continuity over a longer period of time, matched with flexibility—I heard that word quite a lot. We heard that we need more flexibility in funding and support.

Laurie Russell made the point two or three times that there is a need to identify and disseminate best practice. Good things are happening; the Fairbridge organisation is a good example. Such best practice could be rolled out or copied elsewhere to the benefit of other areas. There are many other examples of best practice, but Laurie Russell argued that there should be a systematic way of identifying it and having it rolled out and disseminated across the network of people who deal with the problem.

Another thread of the discussion was output funding, whereby agencies are rewarded for getting someone into a job and sustaining them in it for 13 weeks. That is not adequate; we need to look at keeping people in a job for longer. Perhaps the funding should be directed towards achieving longer-term objectives. That ties in with the specific points that Alan McGregor made about the interrelationship between benefits and working income in respect of practical issues such as going from a weekly payment to a monthly payment and the impact of losing some benefits, particularly if someone starts in a relatively low-wage job. A clear thread that came out of the discussion was that we must manage that transition better. We must bear in mind Karen Gillon's point that we do not want, as a consequence of whatever we do, accidentally to reinforce dependency. We must ensure that whatever we do encourages everybody to move from welfare to work and does not leave people feeling as though they need to start off on benefits.

Alan McGregor's point about the fear factor is important. We must address it in any measure of the framework's success.

Charlene O'Connor mentioned that about a fifth of those who participate in Scottish Enterprise programmes are effectively in the revolving door and reappear regularly. We must address how we can reduce that percentage and how to have a more permanent solution.

The final thread that I picked up was the need for substrategies. Laurie Russell emphasised in his last contribution that there may be 20,000 people in the NEET group who, if the jobs exist and the other issues are addressed, should by and large be able to find employment, education or training, but that there is a subset of 15,000 in that group—the same would apply to the adult group—who have particular issues such as drug use or who are ex-offenders. In addition to the general approach, specialised strategies are required to address the needs of those groups.

I do not know whether members have other threads or disagree with those that I have described, but I think that those are all important points.

Perhaps because of the nature of the folk who gave evidence, we have not talked about the other "e" in NEET to any great extent: we have not talked about education, other than peripherally when the benefits issue was raised. We might want to take that issue up with ministers when they are with us.

I think that the discussion has been helpful, enlightening and informative. This is not an inquiry; we are merely trying to get a feel for the key issues that have to be addressed. In our discussion with ministers, we will raise most if not all of these issues and no doubt some more. If people have additional information that they think it would be helpful for committee members to receive, please submit it through Douglas Thornton, our clerk, and it will be circulated.

Our main thrust will be to use the evidence to inform our legacy paper. All the parties in the Parliament regard this as a major issue that must be addressed.

Finally, I thank each and every one of you for coming. The group was large, so you might not have got in as often as you would have liked, but we deliberately had a large spread of people so that we would get a wide perspective. If you would like to stay and listen to the rest of the committee proceedings, you are welcome to do so. Personally, I would prefer to go to the dentist. I am only joking, by the way—scrub that from the record.

I will suspend the meeting for five minutes while we reset the table.

Meeting suspended.

On resuming—