Ms Fiona Ward:

I will talk about what is happening on the ground and the divisions with regard to our JST customer. Currently, we are calling all of them in for one to one meetings with the case officers. They will go through their individual circumstances and outline the various education and training options that are available and the employment supports that might be suitable for them to assist them in identifying the steps they need to take and to avail of opportunities to secure employment.

We also run information meetings for our JST customers in partnership with community training providers, the local partnerships and the local education and training boards, ETBs. They outline to them the types of programmes they have that might be suitable for them.

We are conscious, as Mr. Egan and Ms Ryan mentioned, that a number of lone parents would be very distant from the workforce and that some of the pre-existing programmes would not be suitable for them. We are working with the local ETBs to develop pre-employment type training programmes of short duration of about nine to ten weeks. They are held in the morning only during the school term because if they have a child of, say, seven, the child is in school. It is about focusing on personal development, skills and profiling. We hope that at the end of those programmes our customers will have a plan for how they might progress further. They might identify other training and education programmes also that might be suitable for them.

We are the very early stages in our engagement with our customers and for those customers, it is a different way of engaging with the Department in that we expect them to come in to us. The results so far have been mixed. I will give an example of one programme, which we developed with a local ETB adult education service. The course started on Monday, but to get to that stage we had two group information sessions with the adult education service to which we called 65 of our JST customers, and 38 customers turned up.

Of that 38, 20 said they were interested in partaking in a pre-employment programme. A further session was called to identify what lone parents wanted in their programme, and 16 people turned up. Four of those had issues around literacy, and they were referred to the literary service. The remaining 12 were interested in personal development, skills and profiling, so we put a programme in place. That programme started on Monday, and three of the 12 people attended on that day. That was very disappointing because of all the work we put into that but we realise this is a group of customers who are not used to engaging with us in a proactive way. We will follow up with those who did not attend to determine what prevented them from attending on the day. We are not giving up on them because if we can get them to participate in that type of programme, they can move on to do other things. That is our position in the division. As I said, it is at an early stage.