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The strategic approaches to employment action-learning programme arose in response to housing providers’ aspiration to work collaboratively to improve their work around supporting tenants into employment. It reflects the importance that many housing providers place on addressing employability and welfare reform in the context of their community investment strategies. It also follows on from a piece of work by HACT and Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion (Inclusion), ‘Housing providers’ approaches to tackling worklessness: Assessing value and impact’, which scoped the range of activities undertaken by housing providers around employment.
In comparison with other sectors, the social housing sector is unusually collaborative. It is this ethos of collaboration, the desire to share best practice, adopt and adapt models that work well, and to share experiences with other housing providers that enabled an action-learning programme to take place.
Collaboration, flexibility and responsiveness are hallmarks of action-learning as a method that empowers participants to be both reflective and reflexive, to support each other, and to disseminate learning back to their own organisations. These elements of learning worked particularly well for employability and welfare reform because participants were willing to share not only the shining examples of good practice, but also to speak frankly about those projects and initiatives that were challenging.
Five areas of key learning and challenges emerged
- Ensuring service provision is strategic
- Reaching those furthest from employment
- Creating employment opportunities with external partners
- Addressing silo working
- Achieving greatest impact