Training and Employment Mens Positive Outcomes

The project will provide a specialised Hub to co-ordinate access to training provision and employment opportunities for workless clients of all ages in the key target wards of Derby City. The Hub will be based in the community at the Livelihood premises in Normanton to provide ease of access to clients and to enable the project to establish a profile within the community. Connexions Derbyshire is already active within this diverse community and has built up strong links with the many minority ethnic groups resident within the area and with many community leaders. Siting the project here will provide an established base to reach out into other key target areas.

Previous work within the target wards of Derby City, both by Connexions staff with their NEET clients and the Connexions hosted Nextstep project which works with adult clients, has identified the lack of co-ordination and coherence around training and employment activities which workless clients are able to access. This has proved to be a limiting factor for these clients and it has also resulted at times in training provision running under capacity as providers have struggled to promote their provision to eligible clients. The proposed project for which EMDA funding is sought will seek to address this gap in the co-ordination of services to the disadvantaged workless clients of these deprived communities and thus add value to the other funded initiatives which are being run in the Derby City area to address the issues of worklessness.

It is also acknowledged that there is still work to be done with employers to raise their awareness of the diversity of clients within the workless group of these areas of deprivation in Derby City and proactive engagement with employers is required to generate leads and opportunities for more clients to access the workplace and experience work tasters as well as accessing paid employment. This will in turn enable these workless clients to begin to play their part in energising their communities and contributing to the economic growth of Derby City.

Connexions Derbyshire is an active partner in Workstation and is represented on the strategic group. Through the work of it's employer engagement team it links with Workstation to promote vacancies to its clients and assist employers in filling their vacancies. Good links already exist between the Livelihood project based in Normanton and Workstation to ensure

• that all opportunities offered by Workstation are readily available to clients;
• that clients are assisted in making their applications and accessing Workstation to support access to opportunities and
• that employers can promote their vacancies as widely as possible.

The proposed HUB would strengthen these links which have already been made.

The LSC and others fund provision across the City and this provision is marketed by the individual training provider. It is no single agency's responsibility to map the available provision making it very difficult for clients and the professionals who work with them to be aware of the full range on offer. The proposed TEMPO project would strengthen the funded activity as it would map all provision available in the area and offer additional and effective lines of communication to ensure that LSC and other funded activity is promoted as widely as possible within this area of multiple deprivation with a wide variety of ethnic languages and nationalities. This would help to ensure that take-up of all funded provision is maximised and address an acknowledged problem which currently exists of courses running at under their capacity while at the same time clients who are seeking courses do not have the information on all that is available to them.

This project has been awarded £90,380 by DDEP

For further information regarding this project please contact:
Carolyn Davies - Connexions Derbyshire - 01773 939570

carolyn.davies@connexions-derbyshire.org

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