Research has shown that over a third of people who use
homeless services don’t have the formal qualifications they need to find
employment or to participate in and enjoy full and active lives. Numerous reports have highlighted the need
for coordinated and specialist education, training and employment support for
homeless people.
Housing support services have long recognised that housing
in itself will not provide a complete answer to the risks and consequences of homelessness.
There is a general consensus that the
availability of specialist education, training and employment (ETE) services has improved
over the last ten years and have played a key role at local level, usually
being seen as flexible and supportive by other agencies and people.
Homeless people often experience significant barriers in engaging
formal education; the advantages are clear and include greater social
integration, confidence and self-esteem. This would give a boost to homeless
people who have a strong academic background but need to update their
qualifications or to re-familiarise with them. Successive governments have also
taken the view that paid work is beneficial in a number of ways; it provides a
route out of poverty and it can address the sense of purposelessness, lack of
direction and poor self-image that may be present among people who have not
worked for sustained periods.
However, many studies have emphasised the need to tackle the
problems and barriers single homeless people face in securing training and
employment. Some of these problems and barriers include low education
attainment, little or no work experience which puts homeless people at a
disadvantage, problematic drug use and poor physical and mental health which renders
them unemployable.
There are also homeless people that have a history of
employment, have qualifications and can perhaps with help, make a move back
into paid work relatively simply. In some cases they have complex needs and
need a great deal of support before the transition to seeking paid work is a
viable option. This means that there are unmet support needs, low levels of
self assurance, a lack of interpersonal skills and also an inability to
structure their time means they cannot immediately use mainstream services
designed to help with job seeking, let alone secure paid work for themselves.
Research carried out by St Mungo’s Broadway suggests that people
in this group may benefit from activities that allow them to develop
interpersonal skills; emotional literacy, assertiveness and self-esteem, as
well from programmes designed to deliver meaningful activity or ‘sheltered’
forms of employment prior to acquiring more formal qualifications.
From experience, front-line housing support workers have frequently
voiced concerns that recent legislative changes have failed to recognise
adequately the vulnerability of young homeless people and that individuals with
particularly traumatic histories were at risk of being pushed out into
mainstream programmes before they were ready.
That put aside, there is clear evidence that education,
training and employment (ETE) services are beneficial to homeless people. The
ETE sector has grown very significantly over the years and is characterised by
innovation, diversification and experimentation with many different forms of
service being developed.
Poached Creative has been working
with The Big Issue to provide practical training in communications and
journalism for people who are homeless and long-term unemployed or facing
significant barriers to employment. The training has been really successful and
has seen some of the trainees regain confidence to pursue recognised journalism
qualifications, write articles for print media such as The Pavement, The Telegraph, and E9 magazine. Some have found work as photographers.
There is a very strong need for coordinated and specialist
education for training and employment support for homeless people by service
providers. This is imperative as resources might be subject to constraint in
future. There is a need for caution, in that it is logical to expect that wider
labour market conditions will have an effect on ETE effectiveness. Realism is needed when considering the scale
of barriers that a minority of homeless people face in relation to securing
paid work. With appropriate ETE and support paid work can be secured, it can
help a person overcome the material and psychological effects of being
homeless.
