Insight: Five years of innovation

Five years ago, the Department for Work and Pensions launched the Restart Scheme to provide intensive, personalised employment support to people facing long-term unemployment and other barriers to work.

Since then, Reed in Partnership has supported thousands of people into sustainable employment through our delivery of the service.

To mark this anniversary, Rachel Fulton, Head of Continuous Improvement, shares some of the work we have taken forward to innovate and enhance our service offer.

As a British, family-owned company with almost 30 years’ experience delivering employment support in communities across the UK, Reed in Partnership has been proud to show the value of locally rooted, high-performing delivery. Over the past five years, our teams have supported thousands of people into sustainable employment, while continually adapting our Restart Scheme delivery to meet changing participant needs, local labour market conditions and employer demand.

Our continuous improvement approach is built around curiosity, ownership and innovation. We use real-time data, participant feedback and frontline insight to identify opportunities, test ideas through pilots, measure impact and scale what works.

Our dedicated Continuous Improvement Team is trained in industry-standard frameworks, including Lean Six Sigma, and supported by 40 Continuous Improvement Agents who have completed our accredited CI Academy.

When the Restart Scheme launched in June 2021, long-term unemployment was expected to continue rising because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Five years later, the labour market has changed. Unemployment did not rise as sharply as predicted, but new challenges have emerged, including higher economic inactivity linked to ill health, rising business costs and changing employer demand.

It is within this context that our continuous improvement approach has tried to find further effective solutions for supporting the demographics of people being referred by Jobcentre Plus to the Restart Scheme, while reflecting the local opportunities available to them to find good, sustainable jobs.

For example, our data showed after two years of delivery that we were supporting an increasing number of people with childcare barriers to work, including 5,600 jobseekers in 2023 alone. The system of childcare support in England is complex and can be daunting to understand. We identified that there were opportunities for enhancing this part of our offer to participants, particularly at the moment changes to childcare funding support were introduced in September 2024.

A Restart Scheme Regional Childcare Coordinator role was established and a range of supporting tools developed. These included guidance on the different types of childcare, guidance on approaching conversations with parents and guardians about childcare needs, finding affordable, good quality, local provision and the funding options available – with particular regard given to the benefit status and entitlement of individual participants. We then ran a pilot which demonstrated a positive performance impact from this dedicated support. Following the pilot, the learning was embedded into the roles of Employment and Skills Trainers and Integration Managers, ensuring knowledge could be shared across multiple offices rather than held within one specialist role.

We also publicly released the resource kit we developed to support the Childcare Coordinators and worked with local authorities and other support services so that anyone advising people with childcare needs could benefit from our insight.

Another area of continuous improvement focus has been on our support for Restart Scheme participants with ESOL needs. Again, our data demonstrated an increasing prevalence of language barriers to work, which was reflective of sudden spikes in immigration numbers during 2022 and 2023. In response, our continuous improvement leads piloted a new translation app that could be used during appointments with Employment Advisers, as well as with external organisations including employers. The app offers live voice, text and document translation in over 50 different languages.

During a pilot, participants who wished to use the app were provided with access for six months. We established that 94% of participants found the approach improved their understanding of English and achieved a positive statistical impact on job outcomes. We therefore committed to investing in a service-wide rollout of the app as a core part of our offer to participants with language barriers.

The use of technology has provided increasingly rapid ways to enhance our service, and we have shared details previously about our award-winning use of AI transcription and appointment summarisation that significantly reduces the administrative burden on our Employment Advisers, giving their more time for the conversations that matter.

We have enhanced these human moments still further through our continuous improvement work. We trialled a change to our operational delivery model by utilising specialist advisers for specific parts of the participant journey. The result of our pilot was an increase in job entry performance and a decrease of 11 days for time to job entry. Participant engagement also increased during the pilot, with fewer unattended appointments recorded.

Over the remainder of our Restart Scheme delivery, the Continuous Improvement Team will continue to test, refine and scale new approaches that strengthen outcomes for participants, employers and communities, while building evidence to inform future employment support.