Feedback from an asylum seeker in Hertfordshire on the Know your Employment Rights course:

Good day! Hope you doing well! We have finished the course with Ronza. We learned a lot and I really appreciate everything that you did for us. Ronza is a good teacher - she was excellent we learned a lot from her. It was really informative and worth all the knowledge so I'm grateful for everything. Thank you so much!

Our IELTS courses are proving extremely popular. We've had this feedback from a client in Essex:

I would like to say thank you for the opportunity to join the IELTS preparation course. This course is so useful and the teachers are amazing, they help so much. I enjoy learning with your team!

Thank you again.

And this one from Bedford:

I am writing to say a huge thank you for accepting me for this English for IELTS course which is really helpful. I have tried ESOL courses previously but they were too basic and given that I am still in process of setting up my family's life here, I couldn't afford time-consuming course with no visible improvements. 

Unlike my previous course, the one you have offered is incredibly helpful and I see my skills development. 

Thank you and the rest of the team. 

SLC are an excellent provider of online IELTS and OET courses. Read more about their work with us and other funders here: Language Training for Refugees – Specialist Language Courses

East of England LGA, Strategic Migration Partnership (SMP)

Employability for Overseas Nationals

Project Report April-June 2024

Overall project aim: We provide an intensive, wrap around model of support across the region with a focus on registering 590 clients to provide general employment support to a range of overseas nationals, including Ukrainians, Hong Kongers and highly skilled workers. We also work with asylum seekers before a decision is made on their asylum claim to assist them with the transition if they are granted leave to remain in the UK.

Overview

EON - EELGA SMP started in November 2023 to meet the needs of clients who cannot access the Refugee Employment Programme (REP) | Get Set UK and STEP Ukraine | World Jewish Relief. At that time it was funded through central government funds held by the SMP and International Recruitment East. It has been enabled to continue into the 2024/25 financial year thanks to funding from 23 local authorities in the region.

1. Employment advisers’ activities delivered.

The employment advisers (EAs) work hard to create/edit CVs, assist with applications, offer a range of advice and refer clients to various external organisations. These external referrals are for services including ESOL, apprenticeships and other training. Internal referrals to the ENIC qualification equivalence service remains a core service, with 45 certificates of equivalence requested in the quarter.

2. Successes, achievements and milestones delivered during this reporting period.

The EAs are seeing a wide range of nationalities and clients with a number of different immigration statuses. Local additional activities vary across the region. Some clients who were assisted into adult social care roles under EON 2023 have successfully received their £500 grant for related expenses from the International Recruitment East programme. The second employability workshop for Hong Kongers in Hertfordshire took place and was extremely popular. IKEA in Peterborough is an outstanding employer which recruited 4 clients initially for short-term placements but with the opportunity of a permanent position at the end of the placement. Overall, with 206 clients enrolled and 26 people finding work, we have an employment rate of 12.5%.

The SMP Hong Kong Hub’s efforts to advertise EON to Hong Kongers, including sharing information through their new Facebook page, have seen success with an increase in referrals from the online form and 26 enquiries in the quarter.

3. Challenges experienced.

The EAs and other partners continue to experience some lack of engagement from referrals. People have busy and often complicated lives so their level of commitment to moving into work may vary significantly over time. Reasons included poor or changes to housing, health problems and part-time work hours. Other challenges include low technical skills or digital exclusion from not having access to appropriate devices.

At the end of the quarter we were informed that our Cambridgeshire employment adviser is leaving for another role in a local authority. So recruitment is ongoing to replace this EA: VACANCIES | HELP (helpcharity.org.uk).

4. Work with asylum seekers.

The number of asylum seekers currently housed in hotels who arrived before the Illegal Migration Act (IMA) came into force on 7/3/2023 was lower than expected. This is being remedied as the EAs are now developing a better understanding of the IMA. Consequently, some asylum seekers in the Contingency Accommodation (CA, mainly hotels) are now eligible for EON because they arrived in the country through legal routes but claimed asylum after the cut-off date. The IMA does not apply to these people so we will start to work with more of them next quarter. Access to people in contingency and dispersed accommodation was initially very slow but is improving. For example, the EAs in Bedfordshire have been able to visit 5 hotels but the EA in Cambridgeshire is still trying to get access to the 2 hotels in his area. Accessing people in dispersed accommodation has been particularly slow in Norfolk and challenging in Suffolk as there are so few asylum seekers now living in the county. The EAs in Hertfordshire and Essex are also working hard to visit hotels in these areas and build up relationships with potential clients. The EAs have found asylum seekers to be interested, welcoming and grateful for the interaction. However, many asylum seekers want to apply for permission to work or ask for assistance that the EAs are not able to provide. This may relate to requests for example for alternative housing, food or clothes.

People remained highly concerned about the Rwanda situation (before the new government announced that this policy would not be pursued) and a general resolution to their claim. Some of our EAs are working with asylum seekers for the first time and they are building up the skills and expertise. It is notable that this group is more likely to experience digital exclusion and are only able attend online meetings/lessons using smartphones since they have no access to other devices.

5. High skills clients.

The work with doctors and the 1-to-1 support for clients is progressing well with the continuing free offer of clinical attachments from East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust although we had only one client start an attachment in the quarter. Accommodation remains a challenge for the clinical attachments that are available since they are rarely offered where the doctor has their home. Over the past quarter work has been ongoing with the Medical Professional Group to offer more clinical attachments and other training opportunities for doctors. Links have been made with Refugee Action to offer mentoring for pharmacists. Other mentoring opportunities have been offered for IT and tech careers with RefuAid. We are investigating a volunteering opportunity with Anglia Ruskin University for refugee doctors to work with current medical students. Work is ongoing to send CVs to various NHS Trusts in the region to enable staff to review and encourage applications based on the review. A connection has been made with the Restore programme for nurses in Sheffield with the potential to offer a similar programme in the East.

6. Entrepreneurialism.

Our partner MENTA has registered 35 clients in total for EON 2024. Over 70% of these are Ukrainian with a few other nationalities represented. The number of Hong Kongers is disappointingly low at just one. The services on offer include 1-to-1 meetings, a personality profile and business planning workshops. The virtual networking event that took place on 11^th June was a success with 9 attendees. Although clients are juggling a range of commitments and there has been some lack of engagement, most clients are progressing well with the course. 11 of the 28 clients from the EON 2023 programme have now (July 2024) started their businesses after working with MENTA and some case studies from these clients are available here: Employability for Overseas Nationals (EON) (menta.org.uk).

7. ESOL.

It is pleasing that the integration courses produced under WW4RI were able to restart under EON 2024. These will be delivered face-to-face in Peterborough, Ipswich and Hertfordshire and online for the rest of the region. Driving theory remains very popular with 14 clients taking part in the first course with GLADCA in Peterborough and 28 online.

We have been preparing a 6-unit housing and homelessness module in partnership with the Greater Manchester Law Centre’s housing expert and Specialist Language Courses (SLC), which will be ready to deliver next quarter.

The IELTS and OET courses also remain extremely popular with 22 students starting SLC’s IELTS courses between April and June. We expect to continue scheduling more IELTS courses very soon.

8. Summary.

The employment advisers have worked very hard to build up relationships with asylum accommodation providers and asylum seekers themselves as a new target group. Across the region they saw 206 new clients of whom 52 are asylum seekers. This puts us in line to reach our target for the year in the third quarter of the project. The EAs will continue to assist asylum seekers in the future. We will work flexibly to develop our services in response to feedback from our funders’ priorities and the new government’s policy and legislative framework.

Please direct any questions about this report to: Gill Searl at gill.searl@eelga.gov.uk or 07790 973101

East of England LGA, Strategic Migration Partnership (SMP)

Employability for Overseas Nationals

Project Report July-September 2024

1. Employment advisers’ activities delivered.

The employment advisers (EAs) work hard to create/edit CVs, assist with applications, offer a range of advice and refer clients to various external organisations. These external referrals are for services including ESOL, apprenticeships and other training. Internal referrals to the ENIC qualification equivalence service remains a core service, with 22 certificates of equivalence requested in the quarter.

2. Successes, achievements and milestones delivered during this reporting period.

This quarter all of the employment advisers have been successful at both registering new clients and working with existing ones. It is pleasing to see that the work done since the start of the financial year is paying off with a rise in the number of clients. For example, the Essex EA is now working with clients in Southend and the Cambridgeshire EA finally has access to a hotel housing asylum seekers and has been building relationships with referral organisations outside Peterborough. The Suffolk EA is expanding his area of work beyond Ipswich by providing short-term employability courses. The first, which took place in Haverhill, was well-received and more are planned.

3. Challenges experienced.

The riots and attacks on hotels housing asylum seekers outside our region in August had a detrimental effect both on our partner organisations (some of whom were forced to close premises) and our clients. Some of the hotels also prevented access by our EAs and others in order safeguard residents during the month of August.

It remains difficult to reach Ukrainians and Hong Kongers in Hertfordshire; however the EA is resolving this by interacting and networking more with referral organisations.

One further challenge has been to find childcare so that a doctor is able to attend a clinical attachment (work placement) outside of her normal place of residence.

4. Work with asylum seekers.

After a long period of contact building, our EAs now have access to nearly all of the hotels housing asylum seekers in the region. Demand varies between the hotels so the EAs are making choices as to which hotels to visit more or less frequently.

In Bedfordshire the EAs have visited 6 hotels in total and will continue to visit some of these. Demand is so high, especially in Luton, that the EAs are having to limit new registrations in order to have the capacity to work with those they have already registered.

The work permit situation of asylum seekers is complicated and EAs have to take care to only assist people with finding jobs that they are permitted to undertake. More asylum seekers than expected have permission to work but some are only permitted to accept work on the Shortage Occupation List or the new Immigration Salary List. Others are able to take any type of work.

Asylum seekers frequently ask for assistance beyond the EAs’ remit, such as moving out of the hotel, more ESOL classes or access to devices. This last issue also causes some people to drop out of our integration courses.

5. High skills clients.

Five high skilled clients were referred to World Jewish Relief for a 12-week mentoring programme within the Royal Household; we are awaiting outcomes to see which, if any, have been selected. We have also relaunched our own mentoring programme and will shortly be matching mentors with clients.

We are now able to financially support up to 10 doctors with costs associated with the requalification process.

Work is ongoing with guiding high skills people back into their profession. Although the focus remains on medical careers, referrals now cover a wider range of work including IT, software and engineers.

The business start-up/self-employment programme through MENTA remains very popular with a total of 36 people registered. EAs have made more referrals and some people will start the programme in October. 19 have fully completed the activities. We already have 11 confirmed businesses started and 4 more are known to be trading but are yet to complete the registration. This is an excellent start-up rate and we expect the numbers to further increase before the end of the financial year.

The IELTS and OET courses remain extremely popular with new classes starting each month. 65 people are now enrolled on or have completed an IELTS or OET course this financial year. The final 3 courses commissioned for the financial year are also filling up very quickly. Learners find these courses highly beneficial and enable them to take the exam with confidence.

It is pleasing that the integration courses produced under WW4RI were able to restart under EON 2024. These are being delivered face-to-face in Peterborough, Ipswich and Hertfordshire; online classes are now open to the whole region thus providing additional options if face-to-face classes are unavailable or fully booked. Driving theory remains very popular with learners. Some classes have completed in all locations including online with more scheduled.

We have been preparing a 6-unit housing and homelessness module in partnership with the Greater Manchester Law Centre’s housing expert and Specialist Language Courses (SLC). Delivery will start in October and November.

Feedback from the ESOL providers shows that asylum seekers frequently have a lower ESOL level and therefore benefit from personal feedback and peer support.

Attendance was a challenge over the summer for various reasons, including some Ukrainians returning to their home country. The ability of some learners to connect to online lessons is also a difficulty to overcome with many asylum seekers accessing online lessons on their mobile phones. They usually do not have any other device available to them.

The employment advisers have worked very hard to build up relationships with asylum accommodation providers and asylum seekers themselves as a new target group. They are now working with 433 people across the region (against a full-year target of 590) of whom 35.5% (154) are asylum seekers. In the first quarter of 2024 this number was 52 so work with this target group is expanding rapidly. However working with asylum seekers places extra demands on the EAs as they a challenging group to work with. Demand from other target groups remains strong, meaning that EAs are under greater pressure than before to meet the needs of all of their clients.

We expect to reach our 590 client target in the third quarter of the project.

Funding requests have been issued to local authorities around the region for the 2025/26 financial year. We are aware that STEP Ukraine will end and we also expect REP to close to new applicants by December 2024. We hope to continue being able to fund EON from the commitments made by the local authorities in the East of England. We will work flexibly to develop our services in response to feedback from our funders’ priorities and the new government’s policy and legislative framework.

Please direct any questions about this report to: Gill Searl at gill.searl@eelga.gov.uk or 07790 973101

East of England LGA, Strategic Migration Partnership (SMP)

Employability for Overseas Nationals

Project Report October-December 2024

1. Employment advisers’ activities delivered.

The employment advisers (EAs) work hard to create/edit CVs, assist with applications, offer a range of advice and refer clients to various external organisations. These external referrals are for services including ESOL, apprenticeships, college courses and other training. In addition to general employment advice, they also register clients for the integration courses offered under EON. They continue to build up links with the various communities, voluntary and local authority sectors to ensure a smooth flow of referrals. This includes visiting residents in various hotels and dispersed asylum seeker accommodation. Referrals to the ENIC qualification equivalence service remains a core service, with 24 certificates of equivalence requested in the quarter (110 in total).

2. Successes, achievements and milestones delivered during this reporting period.

This quarter all of the employment advisers have been successful at both registering new clients and working with existing ones. It is pleasing to see that the work done since the start of the financial year is paying off with a rise in the number of clients. For example, the Bedfordshire EAs have visited all of the asylum seeker hotels in their area repeatedly and are working with clients housed there. The Essex EA is expanding his work with clients in Southend and the Cambridgeshire EA has worked hard at increasing client numbers from outside Peterborough. She has now registered 37 people from Cambridge including 6 Hong Kongers. The Herts EA has focused on building links with the Ukrainian community and this is bearing fruit in terms of client numbers, which are also expected to increase further in January. There were 14 enquiries from potential clients in November and December alone. The Norfolk EA has held drop-in sessions at various locations across Norwich and beyond.

3. Challenges experienced.

Some EAs, in Suffolk and Norfolk in particular, noticed lower engagement and a seasonal drop in job vacancies. Attendance at our Integration Courses, including the new housing course, remains challenging. Registrations frequently do not convert to actual attendance. The ESOL providers and EAs work hard to find out and resolve any barriers to attendance. However, it is noticeable that asylum seeking clients have lower attendance than others. There are a range of reasons for this but they include unstable lifestyles (e.g. sleeping during the day rather than night) as well as a lack of devices and/or Wi-Fi access.

4. Work with asylum seekers.

Although a significant proportion of asylum seekers have permission to work, actually finding employers willing to employ them is a challenge for all of our EAs. Therefore asylum seekers tend to be referred to our ESOL and Integration Courses as well as external training courses. A popular route here is construction so people are referred to providers of CSCS courses. Being able to access a meaningful activity in terms of training is beneficial for the mental health of those willing to undertake them. This also applies to volunteering.

When the situation in a hotel changes, people are frequently concerned with this change in circumstances to the exclusion of other activities. For example, 50 single males were moved into a hotel in Hertfordshire that previously only housed families. The women who had been engaging well there reduced their involvement due to their concerns about the single men who had moved in.

5. High skills clients.

Work is ongoing with guiding high skills people back into their profession. Although the focus remains on medical careers, referrals now cover a wider range of work including IT, software and engineers. We have now financially supported 8 out of 10 medical professionals with the costs associated with the requalification process (PLAB exams, OET classes and other exams). One doctor has finally achieved her GMC registration and gave an interactive session on her pathway back to practice. Seven doctors attended this session to learn from her experience and we expect one more doctor to achieve GMC registration soon.

We have also relaunched our own mentoring programme and will shortly be matching mentors with clients. Three mentors were interviewed for our mentoring programme: an A&E consultant, a service manager for adult social care and a mental health nurse. Their recruitment process will end soon so they are able to start working with clients. We continue to expand our links with potential mentors including within the NHS in St. Albans.

We continue to network with various NHS and voluntary sector organisations to support medical professionals, including an event run by Building Bridges at Birkbeck College, as well as potential clinical attachments at Peterborough & Hinchingbrooke Hospital and Cambridge Hospital. The Peterborough City Council recruitment fair has helped to connect the EON team with various departments in the council and we are looking at further opportunities for our clients.

We have one client who was successful in joining a 12-week mentoring programme within the Royal Household, which will come to an end soon. We are awaiting further information on their progress during the mentoring programme.

6. Entrepreneurialism

The business start-up/self-employment programme through MENTA remains very popular with a total of 49 people registered between April and December 2024. A total of 41 have now completed the entire programme with 23 clients having started their businesses. The types of business are extremely varied and include Zumba classes, vocal coaching, music and speech therapy, making candles, massage and sports therapy, garden design, fruit and flower market stalls, after-school clubs, engineering consultancy, dressmaking, cosmetic clinic, cleaning and a range of artistic services.

Referrals from EAs remain strong with at least 4 intending to start work with the business coach in January 2025. However, some referrals have not turned into active clients for a variety of reasons and the business adviser endeavours to work with all referrals to provide support when the client is ready.

7. English classes

The IELTS and OET courses remain extremely popular with new classes starting each month. 92 people are now enrolled on or have completed an IELTS or OET course this financial year. We scheduled an additional course due to the popularity and this too has filled with learners. All learners are progressing well and consider these courses to be highly beneficial as they enable them to take the exam with confidence. Five people have also undertaken private lessons for OET as there were insufficient numbers to form another class. Where possible and appropriate (good attendance and progress), EON also covers the cost of the IELTS and OET exams.

In general, attendance at IELTS and OET classes is good but remains a significant issue for the Integration Courses. The challenges include Internet access in hotels, a lack of devices as well as unstable lives.

Although the numbers attending the new Housing & Homelessness course have been relatively low at 66, feedback from participants has been good. It shows that people moved from “no/limited” knowledge on housing issues to “moderate/extensive” knowledge, thus demonstrating the impact that the course had. Some referrals to the Housing course had little to no English which caused challenges for the providers. It is common for these classes to have people with a wide range of English ability.

Driving Theory remains the most popular of the Integration Courses.

8. Summary

The employment advisers have worked very hard over the past nine months and are now working with 638 clients across the region of whom 41% (260) are asylum seekers. In the second quarter of 2024 this number was 166 so work with this target group is expanding rapidly. However, working with asylum seekers places extra demands on the EAs as they a challenging group to work with. Demand from other target groups remains strong, meaning that EAs are under greater pressure than before to meet the needs of all of their clients.

We have therefore reached our 590 client target in the third quarter of the project.

Both STEP Ukraine/Ahead and REP have closed to new referrals leaving a gap in terms of employability provision for overseas nationals. This gap may be filled later in the year with Connect To Work contracts. However, this new scheme will only cover some of EON’s current target clients.

Funding requests have been issued to local authorities around the region for the 2025/26 financial year. However, as of 14/1/2025 funding for EON to continue has not been confirmed. Should no further funding be made available in addition to the commitments that have already been made, EON will stop at the end of March 2024. A final decision will be made on 17/1/2025 and communicated to partners and funders shortly thereafter. Should funding be made available to continue into the next financial year by the local authorities in the East of England, we will work flexibly to develop our services in response to the available budget, feedback on our funders’ priorities and the government’s policy and legislative framework.

Please direct any questions about this report to: Gill Searl at gill.searl@eelga.gov.uk or 07790 973101