Welfare Reform Team Evaluation of European Social Fund pilot project 2014-2015

“We supplied members of staff from JCP twice a week to work in the Welfare Reform Team.
This was to build relationships and share ways of working. We agreed, in return, to have a
member of staff from the Welfare reform team working in our office a couple of days a
week. Unfortunately this did not happen. This was really disappointing as we wanted them
to come in and work with us to build continuing relationships.”
“We appreciate you help people to find work to avoid the benefit cap. When families find
16hours work, the impact on Home Choice is that these families then become exempt from
possible offers of accommodation outside of Oxford resulting in longer waits in temporary
accommodation as properties within Oxford are declining over time.”
“Keeping up with benefit changes can be a challenge , especially given that we do not
primarily work with benefit claimants , our client base is vulnerable tenants with complex
issues some of who are affected by benefit changes. So making information on any changes
in benefits & training to make our team understand the changes could be investigated.”
“I feel both parties need to take responsibility for better partnership working, both teams
are under a lot of stress and pressure…”
“In future projects, having a structured approach and targets to aim for to support both
organisations would be beneficial.”
Job fairs
The development of job fairs was a major service initiative. We organised the two
Town Hall events in partnership with JCP, and shared the learning from these first
two events with Aspire, who then took the lead with JCP in putting on the
community-based job fairs in Barton and Blackbird Leys 20 .
The team and other service areas in the council provided logistical, financial and
marketing support to our partners for the Barton and Blackbird Leys events. We have
now developed a delivery model for job fairs which project partners can lead.
A number of improvements were made to the organisation and marketing of
successive job fairs.
At first, there was a mismatch between employer expectations and the readiness of
participants to seek work on the day. This is partly borne out in responses to the
customer questionnaire carried out for this evaluation – of the customers who
attended a job fair, three quarters (75%) said it was “useful to encourage to me to
find a job in the future”, and only one customer said that they were offered a job by
an employer they met at a job fair 21 .
20 The Blackbird Leys job fair was not funded by the ESF project.
21 Reporting on job fair outcomes is difficult because we do not hold the data from events and it is not
publicly available at this time.
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