Portal proves positive for progress of Renfrewshire school leavers
16+ Participation Portal boosts positive outcomes for school leavers in Renfrewshire
Anyone working with young people knows the challenges they can face around the transition from school into positive destinations like work and further or higher education – and how the right support, at the right time, can make a vital difference.
For Melissa McGrogan, Youth Team Manager at Renfrewshire Council’s Employability Service, the 16+ Participation Portal developed by Skills Development Scotland (SDS) not only makes her job much easier, it is now seen as the single most important tool for supporting school leavers in Renfrewshire.
The Portal, a secure online database, shows the activity that all 16 to 19-year-olds are participating in at a local and national level, to track their destinations; so it enables relevant stakeholders to offer further help and advice where necessary. Crucially for Melissa, who works closely with the council’s education team and SDS’s careers information, advice and guidance service, it enables everyone to really focus on school leavers.
“The 16+ Participation Portal gives us the individual names and destinations and helps us track where that young person is and it also allows us to make evidence-based commissioning decisions about how funding should be spent,” she explains.
Daily updates provide vital insight
Melissa sees a big difference between the Portal and the original ‘16+ Data Hub’ it replaced; it is much easier to access and to use; teachers are able to log in view their own schools data and the information held is updated daily; so it paints a far more accurate picture of what is happening across the whole council area.
“We’ve been working to improve our school leaver destination results and teachers now have responsibility for their own data – they don’t have to wait for a central person to enter it. Beforehand, reports were run every quarter and sent out to school staff, but the Portal is updated daily, and they can access it whenever they want to.”
Melissa is part of a Local Employability Partnership (LEP) subgroup that meets every six weeks, focusing purely on youth and including members from Invest in Renfrewshire, SDS, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), West College Scotland and the Community Learning and Development team.
“I’m very focused on the data around school leaver follow up and the Annual Participation Measure, tracking where a young person is and, if they are in a negative destination, why that is,” she says.
“If a young person has gone to college or university, the first time we learn that they’re in a negative; if they have left the course, for example; is when the upload changes on the Portal. Even though we might not have had direct contact with them around that negative, it means that we can still get in front of it, somebody from our subgroup can reach out to them – and that has made a huge difference.
“Young people can have an overwhelming sense of disappointment when a course doesn’t work out, for whatever reason, and they can become quite isolated. If there is someone phoning to offer support, it can take a weight off for them.”
Collaboration key to success
Melissa runs a team of nine advisers and works in partnership with SDS careers advisers and the core team for education. She explains: “The 16+ Participation Portal gives us the name and the destination and makes us ask the question. We get together as a group and decide who is the best person to give that young person a call, based on previous relationships and whether somebody knows them already.”
The results speak for themselves: when the 16+ Data Hub was in use, the figures for ‘participating’ – young people in Renfrewshire in work, further or higher education – was 91.7% while the latest figures from the Portal show it as 93.5%. Similarly, ‘not participating’ was at 3.3% and is now down to 3.1%, while the ‘unknowns’ - young people for whom no outcome was recorded – is down from 5% to 3.4%.
On a broader level, the LEP subgroup, which also has the commissioning provision for Renfrewshire, now uses information from the Portal to decide where things like the No One Left Behind fund – the Scottish Government’s approach to transforming employment – should best be spent.
Shaping the right provision
“We know that we have roughly 1,800 school leavers every year across Renfrewshire and we can run all the reports and break that down and say that we have 25 young people who are interested in a career in childcare, and three have college places, so we need provision for the other 22.
“Our commissioning decisions are very evidence based now – and, for me, that starts with the ease of accessibility around data held on the Portal.
“Renfrewshire got its highest positive destination results this year as a result of us all working together, trying to make sure that young people in Renfrewshire have the best opportunities and using all our resources to do that.
“The 16+ Participation Portal is pivotal in all of this because it’s the starting point; it’s how we join the dots, make sure we have the right provision in place and how we identify when young people need support. It’s the basis for all these vital conversations.”
The Scottish Government’s Opportunities for All commitment “offers a place in learning or training to every 16-19-year-old not in employment, education or training”.
The 16+ Participation Portal – a secure online Portal managed by Skills Development Scotland – helps to identify young people without an offer.
The Portal joins up information between colleges, local authorities (including schools), the Department for Work and Pensions, the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), the Student Awards Agency for Scotland (SAAS) and Skills Development Scotland.
Find out more on the 16+ Participation Portal webpage.