event report

Monday saw the launch of Sarina Russo's Job Access programme in Coventry. Having built up a strong name and gained a lot of experience in Australia, Sarina Russo aim to bring their brand of welfare-to-work delivery to the UK.

ERSA held its annual conference earlier this week, with organisational support from Inclusion. There were a range of breakout sessions, plus plenaries with various industry luminaries. Many of the sessions did not have PowerPoint slides, but those that did are available here.

David Freud and Theresa May popped up at a number of events this week. Possibly the most informative appearance was by Freud at the Social Market Foundation's event on Wednesday, where their plans for existing and future contracts started to come into focus.

The PQQ for FND phase 2 was released today, with an announcement by new Work and Pensions minister Yvette Cooper at the CESI Welfare to Work conference. Later on at the conference, however, it became rather less clear whether this FND2 round would even lead to a contract award. Theresa May and David Freud, representing the Conservative front bench, although not speaking with one voice, made it clear that the current FND model was not what the Conservatives would choose.

The ALP conference that just finished today had far too much content to even attempt full coverage. I've collated some highlights in this story, and a workshop on PRaP has its own story up.

I'm reporting from the Association of Learning Providers 'Forum for Employment and Skills' event over the next two days. It's just about to start, but for now I'll put up the press releases.

As with most contract briefings, the presentations basically repeated the ESF PQQ instructions to make sure that everyone understood what was needed. The only new news was that the previous ESF round (2007-13) has 24,000 starts to date, with 9% job entry rate against starts or 36% against leavers. This compares to a 36% job outcomes target in the new ESF round.

Before each presentation at this event, the speaker often apologised to existing DWP providers that they would probably repeat a lot of information they already knew. Despite this, it was a useful day even for them. The reason? There was over an hour of Q&A with the most senior contracts people in the DWP. I've put together a rough outline of the presentations, and the Q&A. The DWP will publish the slides from the presentations on the 6th of March.

There were lots of breakout sessions at last week's conference. I made it to three, which gave insights into the relationships between primes and subcontractors, the roll-out of FND, and the efficacy of employer-led delivery. As mentioned previously, the complete presentations are available on the CESI website in PowerPoint format.

Prime contracting and subcontractor relationships in New Deal (Seetec)

The London W2W convention was originally scheduled to take place on the day after London ground to a halt under a foot of snow. However, rescheduling didn't harm attendance - the event was packed out, with standing room only for some of the more popular sessions. As always, there were a range of simultaneous presentations, and the report I've put together only gives a taster of the day. CESI has its own webpage with slides and details of all sessions.

Channel 4 ran a documentary about welfare-to-work services in the recession on 16th February. They also have a small accompanying website here in case you missed it. I've put together a summary of the programme's content below which hopefully captures the major points.

Shortly before Christmas, CESI ran a particularly star-studded conference. The sheer quantity of information from the 14 speakers and 6 sessions has taken a while to digest. I've put together some highlights, and the session plan and PowerPoint slides can be found on the CESI website.

Alan Cave (Delivery Director, DWP)
Alan's speech solidified the vision of DWP as market developers, and reaffirmed their commitment to the black-box approach and payment on outcomes. He sounded a note of caution on Purnell's announcement of the 'right to bid', pointing out that this doesn't give the DWP a 'duty to fund' and that the Treasury would need to approve funding as appropriate.

The complete speech is available here:

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/aboutus/2008/25-06...

The following newspaper reports also give a fair outline:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4855c04e-421e-...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/po...

There have been a variety of responses to the speech:

The new Centre for Cities report has received immediate support in the extension of City Strategies announced in the speech

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a seminar being run by the Policy Exchange think tank, where US welfare economist Professor Doug Besharov discussed the US welfare reforms that seem to be motivating the right and scaring the left in the UK at the moment. Interestingly, the main news to emerge was that neither side's views were grounded in the reality of the US welfare system. What follows are notes taken during his presentation, and those of fellow speakers Richard Johnson and James Bartholomew.