Ms Nuala Whelan:

One of the key questions for me is to do with the psychological well-being of the jobseekers when they come in. With my other hat on, I work in Ballymun Job Centre, which manages the local employment services in the Ballymun area, and for many years I have seen how people present to the service, which often was not that well or enthusiastically about work, feeling very low in terms of their self-belief and confidence, not aware of their skills and aptitudes or what they can bring to the labour market. In the study I conducted, 85% of that long-term unemployed sample - 150 people - had previous employment. Forty per cent of them were unemployed for over five years at the point they came into the study and 72% of the full sample came in with quite high levels of psychological distress. People are entering the service like that so if the attitude is negative or punitive when they come in, we are creating an environment in which they do not feel it is safe to discuss their barriers to the labour market. They do not believe they can start to explore their career options and feel under pressure because of the conditionality attached to taking a particular job.

In my study I looked at high support intervention and whether that created different outcomes for people as opposed to the Intreo model the local employment service, LES, was being asked to deliver. People going through the high support services were twice as likely to end up in education and training, in an active labour market programme such as community employment, CE, Tús or something that was helping them to increase their jobs than jobseeking. Some 22% of the participants who went through the service as usual were jobseeking so they were coming in with very low levels of education, highly distressed psychologically and with no belief in or understanding of what they could contribute and yet they were being forced to take a job. They will end up in short-term, precarious work. That is the type of job they will get. I see it all the time. They are the jobs people who come in get, and they end up back in the service after two or three months feeling worse than they did in the first instance.

It is about the "how to" of implementation. What do we do when that client walks in the door? How should the service receive them? What types of interventions might the staff choose to use depending on the specific needs of the client? That must be detailed, and that is what this study tried to do. Not everyone needs high support guidance but some people do. Some people work quite well in the normal service. Women seem to fair well with both the LES and the high support models, but men fair particularly well with the high support intervention.