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

£600,000
£500,000
Oxford's DHP allocation
£525,369
£514,496
Annual allocation from DWP
£400,000
£300,000
£200,000
£100,000
£0
£288,092
£229,846
£105,520
£81,702
2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2014-15 2015-16
It would not have been possible to deliver the project or achieve the range of
outcomes we did without our partners. The project involved a significant expansion
of our partnership network and this is an important legacy of ESF funding.
As a result, we learned a great deal about the extent of employment support
available in Oxford, and also about how we can best direct our customers to the
most effective support. Our work with Restore is an obvious example of how we
were able to improve our offer to customers with mental health issues. Caseworkers
also held regular customer review meetings with key partners and attended
employment support practitioner meetings across the city.
In many cases, support services we wanted to refer customers to were already
funded by the ESF. ESF rules about no double funding meant that we were unable
to include them within the project or had to negotiate with the other service provider
about which of us would own the customer for ESF purposes.
As outlined above and in Appendix 2, we generally had good or excellent working
relationships with project partners, our referrals were usually appropriate and
communications effective.
Where there were issues about the effectiveness of referrals or, more generally,
patchy relations with a few partners, these could have been resolved with better twoway
communication and a renewed commitment to joint working. For example, the
partner organisation most critical of referrals and communications was the one that
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