Does the Government’s Work Programme cherry-pick the easiest people to help into employment?

A Northumbria University academic is first author in a high-profile report evaluating the Government’s employability agenda.

Sarah Foster, a researcher in the Department of Social Work and Communities, worked with a consortium of independent research organisations to examine the effectiveness of the Government’s Work Programme. The Work Programme pays external agencies to help people find work and this payment is based on their success rate in getting people into employment.

The researchers found that this ‘payment-by-results’ model can be less suitable for people with multiple barriers to employment who require specialist support to help them into work. The research also revealed that some providers focused on helping ‘easier to place’ people into work as the cost of providing specialist support for those with the greatest needs could be more expensive that the higher payments available from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

The Work Programme is one of the largest payment-by-results employment programmes in the world, and was developed as a way of improving services and transferring financial risk from the government to the private service providers.

The researchers interviewed staff from DWP and staff working at Work Programme providers to understand both the planned outcomes of the ‘payment-by-results’ scheme as well as the actual consequences of it.

They found that although DWP has built in a differential payment model – with higher financial rewards given for helping certain customer groups into work – this had little impact on how Work Programme providers behaved, in part because the payment groups were based on benefit type rather than support needs.

Another problem discovered by the research was that Work Programme providers were initially assessed and managed by DWP on how they performed in just three of the nine work programme customer groups they worked with. This led to some providers prioritising their support for the groups they knew they would be assessed on, creating a risk of other customers with high support needs who were not part of the assessed areas being ‘parked’.

The DWP responded to this issue in 2014 by introducing more balanced performance measures for Work Programme providers.

Sarah Foster is first author on the Work Programme Evaluation: Operation of the commissioning model, finance and programme delivery report, produced while she worked at the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion. Published last month, the report was commissioned by DWP to independently assess how their Work Programme is delivered by contracted providers.

Sarah said: “Understanding the way the programme has been commissioned and managed is vital to understanding the services being delivered to customers.

“It is promising to hear that DWP have acknowledged the findings regarding the current payment groups and plan to review the payment group structure for future contracts.”

Sarah joined Northumbria University at the end of 2014 as a researcher in the Department of Social Work and Communities.  She will be working with Dr Robbie Duschinsky on a four-year Wellcome Trust funded project on debates regarding disorganised infant attachment.

Northumbria University is in the UK top 50 for research power and has been recognised by the Times Higher Education as having the biggest rise in research power of any university in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). The REF is a national assessment of research quality in UK universities. Over half of the research in Social Work and Social Policy is rated as world leading or internationally excellent, according to the REF. Thanks to a significant investment in research-active staff, Northumbria is now ranked in the UK top 20 for research power in Social Work and Social Policy.