Ms Nuala Whelan:

I will speak briefly on research in which I have been involved looking at the impact of Pathways to Work on well-being and the employability of long-term unemployed jobseekers, with a particular focus on adult guidance. This recent research evaluates the effectiveness of Pathways to Work and points to the importance of focusing on well-being because the unemployed tend to have lower levels of well-being than employed people.

The study used a randomised control methodology to look at the effectiveness of high-support guidance intervention on well-being, career efficacy and some employability factors. A wider outcome of the study was that the significant reform in which FÁS and the Department of Social Protection merged, and the introduction of Pathways to Work, had a major impact on the delivery of guidance, particularly in the local employment service. It also presented a depersonalised service, which is interesting because many jobseekers felt the service had become depersonalised and was no longer about them but about a system of rules by which they and the service had to abide.

The main outcome was the missing "how to" of implementation. While the policy presents many goals that should be achieved in working with jobseekers, how to implement a guidance process was missing. An important finding was that levels of psychological distress among long-term unemployed were high and 72% of participants who presented to the local employment services scored above a clinical well-being cut-off.

Other findings suggested that high-support guidance intervention and the usual local employment service led to improvements, over time, in well-being and employability and a decrease in the levels of psychological distress as people went through the guidance process. This was particularly evident in the case of male participants. Men fare quite well in terms of high-support guidance intervention and presented much better levels of psychological well-being. Measures of employability, such as hopefulness and career efficacy, also improved for people who went through the high-support guidance intervention.

Qualitative findings were that the client-practitioner relationship was extremely important, as were the service setting and skilled staff to deliver the guidance intervention. This study is the first to examine Pathways to Work with regard to psychological well-being and employability outcomes for the long-term unemployed. It focuses on how we can develop a healthy workforce and policy documents such as Pathways to Work and Enterprise 2025 state that we should build a healthy workforce for the future. The model shows that investing in the long-term unemployed contributes to this goal.