Audio file 2026-03-17 NOLB - EDITED.mp3 Transcript 00:00:08 Hannah Randolph Hello and welcome back to our latest Fraser of Allander podcast. 00:00:11 Hannah Randolph I'm Hannah Randolph, a fellow here at the Institute, and today I'm joined by senior fellow Spencer Thompson and fellow Alison Catalano, both of whom are also in the Scottish Health Equity Research Unit, to talk about No One Left Behind. 00:00:25 Hannah Randolph So No One Left Behind is Scotland's approach to employability. And it can be a little bit confusing, because it refers to really three different things. So it is the strategic framework for delivering employability services. It is an umbrella term for multiple funding streams for employability. And it is a specific budgetary line item for employability support. 00:00:49 Hannah Randolph And when we say employability, we're talking about supporting people into employment. So employability, slightly different from employment. And so to start off after trying to sum up No One Left Behind, I'm going to make Alison actually elaborate on that after stealing the best line of the blog that we wrote about it. 00:01:10 Allison Catalano So like Hannah said, you know, it's this strategic framework for service delivery. And that's really kind of the big thing that we're talking about a lot of the time with No One Left Behind. It's also, like she said, an umbrella term for multiple employability funding streams and some specific line items for employability to support, which we'll get into a little bit later because the budgetary system around No One Left Behind is also quite confusing. 00:01:33 Hannah Randolph Well, I guess one key thing first is in contrast to the previous employability system, which was Fair Start Scotland, this is delivered at the local authority level. 00:01:42 Allison Catalano Yeah. 00:01:42 Hannah Randolph So that that's so and then it's administered by the LEP in each local authority. 00:01:47 Allison Catalano But as far as the day-to-day structure and delivery of No One Left Behind, you've got a couple key players. One of them is going to be the Local Employability Partnership, the LEP. The LEP will be delivered by multiple different partners, which includes, you know, people in the local authority and Skills Delivery Scotland and people from different employability partners. 00:02:07 Allison Catalano And they'll sort of meet and decide how to allocate funding based on the data that's available in their local authority and, you know, what they're seeing and what they're experiencing. So an employability delivery partner will be often a third sector organization that delivers employability services directly to individuals. Local authorities can also deliver them for themselves. These delivery partners can be really, really niche or they can be really broad. You can have one in a local authority, you can have several. 00:02:38 Hannah Randolph When you're saying niche, you're talking about like who they're targeting, right? 00:02:41 Allison Catalano Yeah. So, you know, we have a different group of projects at the Fraser of Allander Institute that work with people with learning disabilities and there will be a there's a group of specific third sector organizations that deliver employability, you know, training to people with learning disabilities specifically. So they'll receive some funding from No Left Behind. One thing that can be really difficult with this kind of model is that often we don't really have a clear picture of, you know, how funding is allocated within a local authority, what services they choose, and what data they're kind of using to, you know, decide who to fund. 00:03:19 Hannah Randolph So one feature of the No One Left Behind system, because it is so localized, is that what different local authorities will do could look quite different. And Spencer, you've been doing some work that's thinking about kind of the purpose of No One Left Behind and what it's trying to achieve, right? 00:03:35 Spencer Thompson Yes, No Left Behind as a policy or as a strategy kind of distinguishes itself in two ways. It makes a big deal, firstly, out of being person-centered, is the phrase that is often used. And then secondly, and relatedly, it really aspires to be coordinated, whether that's coordination at the local level through the the LEPs, or whether it's coordination between different public services, or whether it's coordination between local and national governments. So that's another aspect of No One Left Behind that's worth throwing in the mix. 00:04:13 Hannah Randolph And I think one thing that's come up in other projects that we've worked on with the labour market, one potential area that can be an issue for this localized delivery is that local authorities don't perfectly align with labour markets, and a lot of labour markets kind of overlap different areas. So we can think about, about the greater Glasgow area is doesn't encompass just Glasgow City, but other local authorities as well. And so it does seem like there's been some degree of coordination between different local authorities to try to address that. But that can potentially be an issue with delivery, right? 00:04:48 Allison Catalano Yeah, I would imagine so. Again, I think one of the big issues that we have, and Spencer will probably have seen this, you know, in a different area while kind of looking at the more theoretical aspects of No One Left Behind. But just on a practical level, it's really hard to look at local authorities and figure out what services they actually offer. We don't know if Glasgow City offers a lot of things for, you know, people with disabilities and then West Dunbartonshire doesn't. Just to give an example, I don't know what goes on in either local authorities, just to be clear. But what that means is that someone who's within the Glasgow City region who would be part of the Glasgow City labour market may not have access to these programs that would be really important for helping support them into work. 00:05:34 Allison Catalano And again, like I said, I don't actually know that that is or isn't the case because that's sort of information doesn't really exist anywhere in a way that's easy to find and transparent, unless I were to search local authority by local authority, hope that they've published very, you know, transparent overviews on their services, which a lot of them haven't, and then, you know, like rigorously compare the offerings between the two. You know, it's just that that sort of information just doesn't really exist. 00:06:01 Spencer Thompson Yeah, I mean, one way you can phrase this is to say that a known left mind is very much concerned with coordination between institutions that are involved in provision of employability services. It is perhaps, it's hard to tell, but it's perhaps less concerned with coordination between those institutions and, let's say, economic realities. You can imagine somebody who lives near the border of two local authorities, their world is not limited to the administrative boundaries of that local authority. And if you look, for example, like travel to work areas, which are the ONS compiles, I think they're supposed to be compiled so that 75% of people who live in them work in them and vice versa. I don't know exactly how it works, but if you compare that to a map of local authorities, it's very different. And as you said, Hannah, like particularly the big cities will encompass a pretty large labour market. 00:06:53 Spencer Thompson So there's an issue there around how services are designed and administered when they are sort of, yes, they're localized, but they're localized in a way that aligns with administrative boundaries rather than necessarily with economic boundaries or areas. So you can see that potentially creating issues. As you say, I mean, it's not like people don't know about this. Local authorities do work to coordinate between themselves as well to make sure that those kinds of issues are addressed. But it's definitely part of the design is that it draws lines based on local authority boundaries in one way or another. 00:07:31 Hannah Randolph And part of that is probably - you were saying before we started recording, you know, that it's very, employability services in general tend to be very supply side focused in the labour market. It's very focused on the people who are trying to get into work and maybe a bit less focused on the demand side of the equation, which is the businesses that are looking to employ people. 00:07:51 Hannah Randolph And the demand side, it feels like is maybe handled a bit more by things like the city region deals, which do tend, which are combinations of local authorities and not just single local authorities. 00:08:01 Spencer Thompson Yeah, that's right. I mean, I mentioned that No One Left Behind distinguishes itself by being person-centred, and I mean, that is really to mark a contrast with the kind of top- down, rigid, I guess, service-centred approaches that have often come before, particularly at the UK level, and have been criticised for not meeting the needs of individuals. So No One Left Behind aspires to be person-centred, and that it tries to fit the person or the service to the person rather than the person to the service. In itself, that's better. Out of those two options, you would rather have a person-centered approach, but it's not the only kind of dimension to consider. 00:08:43 Spencer Thompson If you're just focusing on that individual and their needs or the barriers that they face as an individual, that could be missing the bigger picture, the labour market conditions that that person has to contend with. So without implying that sort of employability policy should be an all-purpose economic policy, there's definitely a question there around how those, how supply side policies, employability policies. How they align with more demand-side interventions like the ones you mentioned, I think that's a really important piece of the puzzle. 00:09:14 Allison Catalano Yeah. It's so hard because when you talk to people working in, you know, the employability sector and people who work really closely with No One Left Behind, they're really, really adamant about the fact that employment is not the only positive outcome and shouldn't be the only positive outcome. And that there are lots of things that people can go into, you know, employment isn't going to be right for every single person. But if a person is getting into volunteer work, if a person is in training that they find fulfilling, like those can have, looking at it from like a preventative health perspective, having something fulfilling can do a lot in the long run for individual health. If this is our only source of addressing employment levels in Scotland, and the point of it is to do a bunch of other things, is to kind of cover all these other areas, it is missing a piece of that puzzle, which, again, isn't to say that's the design of No One Left Behind. It should have all these positive outcomes. 00:10:11 Allison Catalano One of the things we've noticed is that, again, going back to this data piece, it's really hard to figure out how many people had any positive outcome at all because it just isn't quite counted that way, even though that - that's the point of the program is that people have positive outcomes beyond just employment. So it does seem like there are a couple, again, like if we're looking at a sort of whole system approach to improving labour market outcomes for people in Scotland, it seems like there's a lot of things that are kind of missing there. 00:10:39 Hannah Randolph Yeah. And the counterpoint, I think, to what you've mentioned, which is that some people really emphasize that it's not just a job that represents a positive outcome, but then there are also people who want to emphasize that that is the, if not the end goal, that's kind of the most important outcome. And I think this is, we've spoken to people who have worked for a long time in sort of disability employment. And so that is coming from a place of not wanting it to be, you know, here's a person with a disability and they've entered volunteer work and that's lovely. And so that's their positive outcome and we've, we've served their needs and not wanting it to be left there, particularly since Scotland has goals around reducing the disability employment gap and so on. 00:11:25 Hannah Randolph So it was very interesting trying to get a handle on this and just speaking to a lot of different people and hearing so many different perspectives of something that I think when we came into it, we thought would be more straightforward. 00:11:38 Allison Catalano I mean, the disability piece is really kind of where you really do need employer buy-in, because a lot of the reason why people with disabilities and disabled people will avoid entering the labour market or may be nervous about entering the labour market is because of stigma and negative experiences with employers in the past and building in, you know, better disability awareness, better systems around disability at the employer level is definitely going to be like, that's a hugely important piece of the puzzle, as we've said. 00:12:09 Hannah Randolph And in terms of particularly health inequalities, because, as I've said, both of you work in SHERU, the Scottish Health Equity Research Unit. And so in terms of the socioeconomic drivers of health inequalities, employment is one of them. It's also a consequence of health. And Spencer, you were saying something earlier about the sort of whether and where employability services intervene. Could you say a bit more about that? 00:12:34 Spencer Thompson Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, I think employability services have the potential to address, to help address some of the socioeconomic drivers of health inequalities, which is what we're largely concerned about in SHERU. I don't think No One Left Behind is consciously framed in that way, by the way. I mean, we've also done some work on housing where there maybe is more of an explicit link that has been made between housing and health inequalities. For example, the Housing to 2040 strategy. I don't think we really see that in No One Left Behind. We definitely see a lot of awareness about the interrelationships between health and work, but it's maybe just not framed in that way that actually, you know, there's a preventative potential here that if you can improve outcomes in one way that you can prevent negative outcomes kind of downstream. 00:13:31 Spencer Thompson So I think this links back to the point about supply and demand in the labour market, I think, which is that a lot of the negative outcomes that people experience in the labour market are not really due to their kind of unique circumstances as individuals, they're due to the way that the labour market is structured and to the sorts of one easier way of saying that is just the sorts of jobs that are available. And, you know, we know that there are problems of low pay and insecure work, for example, which are really significantly implicated in health inequalities. And because it's supply focus, No One Left Behind, although it's not to say that it doesn't engage with those problems at all, it doesn't really, really the target. So I think that there's No One Left Behind has that kind of preventative potential. But I think we'd like to see it more centered. And I think if you were to consider health inequalities more explicitly, other things might fall into place. For example, this demand piece. 00:14:30 Allison Catalano Yeah, it's almost like a lot of the preventative stuff can be kind of pushed under the fact that, you know, there are certain priority groups for No One Left Behind, where there'll be specific funding streams earmarked for parents and people who have disabilities. So when you like, you know, getting parents into work can help alleviate child poverty. There's obviously a very downstream way of addressing health inequalities many, many, many years into the future through that and addressing disabled employment. How downstream that is can be argued, but there's also there's there's an argument there. 00:15:05 Allison Catalano But I think, you know, one of the things that. What you're just saying kind of brings up is there's a lot of push in Scotland to work towards joined up policy approaches and No One Left Behind does, when we're talking about addressing health inequality. So, you know, employment doesn't exist in a silo. It exists alongside things like transport, things like housing, things like city planning, and the NHS itself. And pieces of all of those play into a person's health when kind of combined together. 00:15:36 Allison Catalano And one of the things that comes up in No One Left Behind is that it's simultaneously, seems like, from my perspective, it seems like a good example of joined-up working and also a clear example of where joined-up working really, really fails in Scotland. There's one example that Hannah and I, you know, we wrote a blog, and one example came up that was a really good example where joined-up working exists, and that's where, in Shetland, they've funded people to take driving lessons, which is not part of employability, that's not within the remit, but they've seen a very clear barrier to employment, and they've worked towards addressing that for some people. Again, Shetland is a really small local authority. The fact that transport would be an issue is seems, you know, intuitive when you think about it, but the fact that they've kind of put employability funds towards this program is a really interesting way of addressing that. 00:16:25 Allison Catalano And again, this is a really downstream way of addressing health, but if you can bridge someone's access to employment, access to income, and access to health services in the long run, really, you are sort of addressing that. But where we also see big struggles with it is that's one local authority where one intervention succeeded. In other local authorities, are there similar interventions or parallel interventions where they do, you know, the employability department maybe does need a lot of input from planning in order to get people to work, or they need a lot of input from housing in order to make sure that houses are built where there's work. Are those conversations being had? Are they able to be had? And is that ability to work together within a local authority actually succeeding outside of just labour market dynamics? 00:17:13 Hannah Randolph And that does seem like the role for Scottish Government would be trying to join those things up because certainly the people who are delivering frontline employability services should not also have to think about where should we build affordable housing and that kind of thing. But the examples that you've pulled out are, I think, examples of where the really localized approach and having the employability partners and the third sector organizations involved in delivery really does work because you can take a different approach in different local authorities to fit what people need. You have a good sort of on the ground view of what barriers people are facing. 00:17:51 Hannah Randolph And I know that in some local authorities and thinking specifically about Glasgow, there are some third sector organizations that are involved in employability delivery that also kind of provide more holistic family support. And so if someone comes in, they can offer employability services, but they may also sit down with them and do kind of an income maximization exercise and say you could be claiming these benefits, and we'll try to work with them to make sure that they're claiming what they're entitled to. 00:18:19 Hannah Randolph And then also have an honest conversation about whether or not someone is probably going to be better off in work. And this has come up, Spencer, with conversations that we've had related to child poverty, where especially for people with young children, there are sometimes cases where, you know, it's better to just make sure you're claiming what benefits you can and perhaps not working. So I think that kind of flexibility is there, which is a bonus of this approach. 00:18:47 Spencer Thompson Something I wanted to mention on the question of which groups are being prioritized. From a health equity perspective, we have a focus on two particular groups. One is families with children. Those are definitely recognized in No One Left Behind as being a key group. There's a lot of links between No One Left Behind and, for example, the child poverty strategy. I don't see the same recognition of young men in No One Left Behind. So that's an interesting question, I suppose, is to ask why, because I think that there are there are even just strictly in terms of the labour market, even before we get to the health part, you know, there are patterns that are evident there in terms of young men and the outcomes that they're experiencing in the labour markets. 00:19:45 Spencer Thompson I think that's potentially an example of the sort of blind spot that we've encountered in a lot of different policy areas. It's not to say that, you know, it's not to say we're advocating for young men to be kind of a priority group or something like in terms of the way that services are designed, but the awareness of the issues that they're experiencing is important. 00:20:14 Allison Catalano Yeah, men are a particularly interesting case because when we've done, you know, looking into young men, the group that we're looking at is specifically like 18 to 44, which like we've had people espousing some opinions on whether or not 44 is young. 44 is young. For this purpose, we're going to say 44 is young. 00:20:37 Hannah Randolph And we may change that definition. 00:20:39 Allison Catalano We may, you know, 5, six years, maybe 45 is young. We'll see. Seven years. But we kind of picked that demographic because that's the age where, you know, before a lot of the really negative health impacts that men face, like deaths from drugs, alcohol, suicide, and related conditions, that age group is really before those problems start to set in. And they're an interesting case because they're the most employed group of people. They're also the people who, you know, when they're not employed, have the worst outcomes. It's like a very extreme situation that I think men in Scotland really find themselves in. 00:21:22 Allison Catalano And in kind of presenting this research recently, we've had a lot of people bring up issues around men during like these early school transitions. And it's like, what we see a lot is that when men are leaving school, like there's a lot of programs that exist for them. Anecdotally, some people were saying that men aren't participating in programs that are available to them, which is a really interesting thought. You know, it's not just like, are these - are they not being served by these programs? Are they also not buying into them? I think we need to see a little bit more data on that before we like felt really confident agreeing with that. But that anecdotally people are seeing that is one thing that's super interesting. 00:21:59 Allison Catalano We also have a lot of policies directed towards parents, like I said, you know, there's funding that's earmarked specifically for parents with young children. Men are significantly less likely to live with young children than women are, you know, so they're also kind of missing out on on that aspect of it as well. 00:22:17 Hannah Randolph You mentioned data, which has triggered the whole next part of the podcast and part probably the part that we'll wrap up on is that some of the data that comes out of No One Left Behind, because - for those who are listening who maybe don't know as many economists as we do, if economists see a program, they really want to evaluate it. 00:22:35 Hannah Randolph And so we've looked at what data come out of No One Left Behind. And I think a key question for anyone thinking about a particular policy or an approach is, hopefully thinking about is it working or how do we know if it's working? So again, we transitioned into No One Left Behind. The previous approach was called Fair Start Scotland. So do we know if No One Left Behind is doing better than Fair Start Scotland or is working better? Do we know for what groups No One Left Behind is working? Alison, can we answer these types of questions? 00:23:07 Allison Catalano No. No, that's a good question. So there's a couple issues with the data piece in No One Left Behind. One is the data that they use to make decisions at local authority level, there are a ton of problems with that. The, you know, how do you know how to allocate funding if you don't know, you know, if you're prioritizing disabled people and you don't have a grasp on how many people in your population are likely to be disabled, are you allocating funding appropriately? 00:23:36 Allison Catalano A lot of the time that data rests on the Annual Population Survey, which there are tons of problems with, which I won't, I won't go into, but. 00:23:44 Hannah Randolph This is Alison's favourite topic. 00:23:46 Allison Catalano It's my bugbear, is the Annual Population Survey. It just, it isn't currently fit for the purpose at the local authority level and the Scottish Government has acknowledged this. They've reduced funding, but for the next, for the foreseeable future, we don't have a good sense of a lot of population dynamics at a local authority level. That information is required, I think, to make decisions at a local authority level. Without that, that's a huge gap. There's also, you know, the data that is produced in local authorities about No One Left Behind usage. Statistics make it a little bit difficult to kind of understand. Like I said, we can't really sit there and look at the statistics and say, this is how many people in local authority A had any positive outcome compared to local authority B. There's also like, there's a lot of different. ways that that data is collected. 00:24:37 Allison Catalano Some local authorities, for instance, will use No One Left Behind funds to prioritize people closest to the labour market. So what they'll look like is that they've got tons and tons and tons of people who moved into work. Some will use No One Left Behind to prioritize people who are far away from the labour market, so they won't, they'll look like they've had really bad results in comparison. But because we know this is happening, we know necessarily that you just can't compare local authorities. You can't really know about the decision making that goes behind funding decisions, you also can't know how local authorities are achieving relative to each other. So that's a big missing piece. In speaking to a couple of local authorities, I know that some people feel like there's a really big burden on the amount of data they have to collect. 00:25:21 Allison Catalano I don't know, Spencer, if you've encountered people talking about that as well. Essentially, it's more than 100 questions in what's called the Shared Measurement Framework. They have to at some point produce and answer all of those questions for every person who uses No One Left Behind. When they have to do that is quite variable. Some local authorities have people do it when, like at the end, like the intake sessions, like when they're first meeting someone, they're going through this whole gambit of, honestly, sometimes like very personal questions. Some are just like, collect them as you go, because you might find like a person's sexual orientation, isn't relevant to their employment journey and that question might never get asked. 00:26:07 Allison Catalano Again, some local authorities might ask that sort of question right at intake and some local authorities might, you know, work with a person, find out down the line that sexual orientation may be relevant and ask that question eventually. So that's one example of like the different ways that this data is collected and why it can be so hard to figure out what's going on. And month to month, they'll, I think they release it, do they release statistics every month or like every quarter or something? But in each local authority, that data might be incomplete for the current month and it might take several months for them to backfill information about most of the people who use those services. But what we've heard is just the volume feels quite burdensome for people at this point. 00:26:47 Hannah Randolph Yeah, and it was because they're required to collect the information and Scottish government are quite clear that they don't expect that all to be collected in the first meeting. But from the local authority perspective or the delivery partner perspective, if they're required to provide it, they don't know that people, if people will show up for a second meeting or not. And so it does kind of create a slightly weird incentive to try to collect as much of the information upfront as they can, but that could potentially be off-putting or yeah, sort of create some problems in the relationship between the advisor and the client. It is a tricky one. It is. 00:27:24 Hannah Randolph And you've sort of raised a few distinct issues. So you've split them up, split it up into three, but I might come up with more. So you've raised the issue of what information do local authorities use when they're making decisions, which is sort of outside of the No One Left Behind universe, they're using other data, and is that data appropriate and accurate? So, problems with the Annual Population Survey, of course, and then the data that No One Left Behind generates. So we've got this collection process. 00:27:53 Hannah Randolph And I was asking you before about the can we compare to Fair Start Scotland because you were saying, you know, really can't compare very well across different local authorities because we don't necessarily know what they're trying to achieve or what sort of steps they've taken to get there. And so we may have some missing information about people's characteristics, and that makes it hard to compare across different groups. This is also the data collection framework is a bit different than what was used in Fair Start Scotland, so we can't compare it to Fair Start Scotland. So it has created kind of a weird thing where you can see at every step maybe why they've gone the direction they've gone, but it can be frustrating because you have nothing to compare to. 00:28:30 Allison Catalano Yeah, and like, you know that the Scottish Government, like, wants to make sure that they've got full robust data on people. Like, going back to that, you know, they want to know that they're servicing disabled people, that they're servicing people with different sexual orientations, that they're servicing people who are parents appropriately, and that they're targeting, that the populations that they're targeting are actually getting targeted. But what ends up coming out of that is just is a really, really large volume of personal data on a lot of individuals that maybe isn't being used as well as it could be, or to the extent that it should be, or, you know, may just be over collected and may not be necessary to be used at all. Spencer, I don't know if you have any insight into the data collection piece, if you've found anything on your end. 00:29:13 Spencer Thompson Not particularly, not as such. I think this is quite a common problem with policies that are localised or devolved to local authorities is data, because what the Scottish Government have done in this case, I think to their credit, is they've tried to foresee the problem of data being inconsistent between local authorities, which is often the case by implementing this shared measurement framework. The trade-off there is you're asking local authorities to do a lot of work, and if it's just an obligation, then they're going to collect it whether or not they need it, as you said. And it's just a difficult balance to strike. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but obviously from an outside perspective that makes things a little difficult at times. 00:30:04 Hannah Randolph Well, thank you both for joining me today. If you want to hear more about No One Left Behind and employability, you can look on the share and the FAI websites for the blog that Alison and I have put out, and you should keep an eye out for things that Spencer will publish in the future, talking more about the theory and structure behind No One Left Behind. 00:30:23 Hannah Randolph So until our next Fraser of Allander podcast, we'll see you then.