Workforce Plus Strategy
The Workforce Plus Strategy was launched on 12th June 2006. Workforce Plus is the Scottish Government Employability Framework and set out a framework to support partnership working at a local level to tackle long term unemployment and in particular hard to reach groups. The framework contains a number of key strands of activity:
- Local Partnerships – the seven priority areas
- National Partnership – Scottish Employability Forum
- Funding and Innovation
- Policy Linkages – health, young people
- The Workforce Plus Team
Workforce Plus sets out the approach to helping people in Scotland move from welfare to work. It made a commitment to provide national leadership and support local action to address the challenges facing us all to improve people’s “employability” through a range of services.
There have been a number of other important key developments since the launch of Workforce Plus.
- We have reviewed the role and remit of National Workforce Plus Partnership Board in January 2009 and it became the Scottish Employability Forum (SEF). The membership was extended and its remit widened to embrace employability policy and practice more broadly, rather than a more narrow focus on Workforce Plus. The role and remit of the SEF was further reviewed in October 2009 to take account of the impact of the recession and to consider how national agencies might respond to the changing economic circumstances, as well as consider the challenges of more traditional hard to reach groups.
- The Workforce Plus Team has had active engagement with local areas across Scotland, beyond the seven original areas ear-marked for support, on the development of local employability groups which sit with the framework of Community Planning locally.
- The National Delivery Group has been developed as a key stakeholder-led group which has developed its approach to embrace learning and networking and has spawned the Employability Learning Network which provides partner-led support to local employability partnerships. Having achieved this, we are proposing to undertake a review of the National Delivery Group (NDG) to consider how, 3 years on, it might best support local delivery, and how its linkages might be strengthened. In particular, the linkages with the reformed Scottish Employability Forum, the emerging Third Sector Employability Forum.
Within this section you can find:
From September 2009 The Scottish Governments Workforce Plus Team became known as The Employability Team.