Old wine in new bottles? the New Employment Services Model is coming
Will the New Employment Services Model realise the vision of the Expert Panel? Probably not without more investment in the needs of people who do not get jobs easily says @simonecasey in this week’s Power to Persuade blog.
In the past I have alerted readers of Power to Persuade blogs to some concerns about directions in employment services reform, the associated forms of welfare conditionality, and the shift to digital employment services. These are matters I follow in an academic capacity, and now as a Policy Advisor at ACOSS, but the views I express here are my own observations.
In this blog I provide a summary of the changes that are happening in mainstream employment services in 2022. These changes have relevance across a range of areas of public and social policy relating to the way the unemployment is governed and managed. This New Emploiyment Services Model will be launched in July 2022, but will it realise the vision of the Expert Panel? I will return to this question at the conclusion of this article after outlining what the new model looks like.
The latest round of reform emanates from a review by a government appointed Expert Panel which gathered evidence from a range of stakeholders including employment services providers, policy advocates, people who had used employment services, business groups, peak bodies and academics.
The Expert panel made a range of recommendations intended to restore trust in employment services, to be more user-friendly by putting users at the centre of the system, to be more personalized, to provide more support and investment, to increase the time providers had to spend with people, and to empower people to have more control.
A New Employment Services Model (NESM) has been under construction since the Expert Panel reported, with trials in two locations alongside the development of digital employment services.
There is a new brand Workforce Australia
The new brand Workforce Australia is the umbrella brand for a suite of services administered by the Department of Employment, Skills and Education (DESE) including the New Employment Services model. This means people who are looking for work will be signed up with a provider of Workforce Australia services.
People will be streamed into either digital or face to face services
People who are classified as ‘job ready’ will mostly become Digital Employment Service users for the first year they are looking for a job. The other half of people who are assessed as having more significant barriers to getting jobs or a lack of digital literacy, there will be a new service currently referred to a ‘Enhanced Services’.
Because Enhanced Services will be provided to about half the number of job seekers than there were in jobactive the overall resources for contracted employment services will shrink. In the NESM the Government will only pay fees to Enhanced Services providers for the job seekers who are classified as having more barriers to employment. This has been estimated as being approximately half of the current Stream B and most of the current Stream C caseload. The easier to place Stream A and B job seekers that formed the mainstay of the income source in jobactive will become Digital employment services users in the NESM.
The Enhanced Services market will be established as a panel with a new licensing model that will not use Star Ratings. This performance framework will result in poorly performing providers being replaced by others periodically at two- and four-year intervals. Panel licenses will be issued up to a maximum of 7 providers in metropolitan employment regions and in regional locations there may be around 2-3 providers. Caseload sizes for workers have been costed at around 80 clients for each worker.
Enhanced Services
It is primarily people who are, or who are deemed to be at risk of longer-term unemployment, that the new Enhanced Services stream[1] are intended for and this risk will be assessed by using an assessment similar to the existing Job Seeker Classification Instrument. Enhanced services will involve appointments to establish and review job plans and customise the new points-based activation requirements to the individual’s circumstances. While these ‘Enhanced services’ are described as case management services the emphasis will be on employability coaching and job placement brokering.
Employability Skills Training will be expanded
Perhaps the biggest change in the NESM is with the expansion of Employability Skills Training (EST) which will become the mandatory activity instead of Work for the Dole (at least for the first year in which people are required to participate in employment services). EST was established in 2016 as a work-preparation training and industry immersion program that was compulsory for people aged under 25 years as part of the broader Youth Jobs Path suite of programs.
EST involves two blocks of training, that draw on units from Certificate courses for Work Preparation. The revamped EST in the NESM will comprise two months of this training, face-to-face and in a group setting. In the NESM people streamed into Digital Services will be required to undertake EST after 4 months and in Enhanced Services after 6 months.
It is also expected that EST Providers will also deliver a new Placement Management Service, which will involve brokering work experience placements that last for one month. These work experience placements will be part of an expanded National Work Experience Program in which providers and employers will both receive a $1000 payment, while the person who does the Work Experience will receive a $200 per fortnight income support supplement.
Digital employment services will be extended with Points-based activation
Almost everyone in the NESM will be required to use some forms of online reporting. This online reporting is an extension of the existing job seeker dashboard applications I have written about previously, such as those used for reporting compliance with mutual obligations in the Targeted Compliance Framework.
But the use of online reporting will be somewhat different as a new model of Points-based activation will be implemented. This Points-based activation will replace the standard 20 jobs per month target with a range of different activities and tasks. The idea behind Points-based activation is to enable job seekers to use a variety of methods to demonstrate they are actively seeking work, or taking steps to address issues that may be preventing them from being able to work.
Will the changes realise the vision of the Expert Panel?
This shift to digital employment services and the smaller market of Enhanced Services providers sets up new ways of governing the unemployed. These changes are intended to relieve some of the ineffectiveness of employment services and the risks this has posed to the government in terms of accountability for expenditure and social security administration.
But it is questionable whether these changes will go far enough to provide assistance to those who do not get jobs easily and there are risks that will accompany the greater reliance on digital employment services.
There are also concerns because the payment model is still hamstrung by the necessity getting people into any job quickly, rather than longer term human capital investment approaches that many long-term unemployed people need. It may also lead to financial viability issues for smaller providers without significant reserves when they can’t meet unrealistic goals for getting people who are longer term unemployed into jobs.
Similarly, the emphasis on Employability Skills Training is a concern because it is another evolution of the ‘work first’ policy that has hindered employment services from adopting human capital investment approaches. In addition, ‘work first’ tends to place onerous requirements on people so that they will get jobs quickly when the reality is, this kind of pressure has not been successful for people who are long term unemployed in the past.
Digital employment services have some risks too. Although the concept of Points-based activation was intended to provide more flexibility, there are concerns about whether digital employment services will be more than a system for monitoring whether people have met mutual obligation requirements. When people don’t complete these tasks, and or if they do not sign a digital job plan, they risk having their payment cut-off.
So, in some respects the NESM is shaping up as an evolution of work first and lacks the resources to invest in the human capital development and job creation that is needed for people who have been unemployed long term.
1] The tender documentation accompanying the purchasing Enhanced Services is available here.
Article posted by @simonecasey