Integrating social support into training: feedback from a programme at regional level

Since the 1980s, employment policies have combined intermediation with support work in order to integrate job seekers into the labour market. However, there was a change of approach in the 2000s. Since then, the emphasis has been on helping individuals achieve a degree of autonomy in order to develop their ability to contribute to their own employability. 

Support programmes aim to equip trainees with the tools and skills required to adapt to developments in the labour market. By assigning a dedicated social support worker to each participant, the “Prépa rebond” scheme “formalises the individualised sup- port function by recognising the time-consuming aspect of the work required to overcome the periph- eral obstacles to access to training or employment”. The teams charged with the task of developing a multidimensional support programme designed to “remove” these “obstacles” emphasise its individualised nature and generally aim to act on various interdependent aspects, such as participants’ living conditions, health, mobility and self-confidence. 

The social support is envisaged first and foremost as a means of accelerating the process of accessing rights and is intended, through the intense pace of the exchanges, to tighten the “safety net” formed by the social protection programmes around participants. For example, one social support worker acted as an institutional guarantor for Célestin, aged 22, who had been living on the streets before joining the scheme, so that he could obtain a place in a young workers’ hostel: “In this case, we were in close contact with the local employment information and advice services for young people and the hostel just to say: ‘There you go, the lad’s been there for several weeks, it’s going well, the situation is stabilising’”. In addition to assistance with the procedures involved in making medical appointments or making an application to register as a disabled worker, the health support is intended to be a means of changing the stigmatising attitudes towards health problems. This support work puts physical capacities at the heart of clients’ career plans (by considering retraining, for example, the adaptation of work stations, etc.). Similarly, in order to help participants with the rulings on geographical mobility, the support the teams provide often combines an administrative dimension (help in obtaining government assistance to take the driving test or with personal mobility, registration with a vehicle hire association or driving school) with work on attitudes in order to help participants picture themselves in a new place. Working on participants’ apprehensions, fears and personal experiences necessarily involves the teams in forging relationships of trust. This is all the more true since the long-term integration into the labour market that the scheme is intended to encourage is conceived as arising from individual choices made in full knowledge of the possible fields of employment. However, participants doubt their own capabilities and almost all of them have a negative self-image. The restoration of self- esteem is regarded as a prerequisite for any career plan, which often leads the support staff to work simultaneously on job search techniques and self- discovery and self-expression activities (computer exercises, drama activities, sport). To that end, the support workers are encouraged to create synergies with other local schemes, services and actors but find themselves confronted with the regional inequalities in training provision. While the scheme was conceived as a means of mitigating the lack of training provision in rural areas, it is not sufficient to compensate for pre-existing inequalities. Apart from this dimension, other factors also contribute to the creation of disparities in the provision of support.

The survey has revealed two types of factors giving rise to variations in the impact of social support: differences in the way the support is implemented, on the one hand, and, on the other, the diversity of the target populations. 

With regard to the first aspect, the training organisations have made relatively contrasting choices when selecting the personnel charged with delivering the social support, or rather with “directing [clients] to the appropriate organisations depending on the difficulties encountered”.* This is a task that requires solid knowledge of the resources available in the various areas of social provision in a specific territory. However, it seems that the effectiveness of the support is strongly influenced by the status and qualifications of the professionals recruited. 

At all the sites surveyed [1], the social support is entrusted to women aged over 40 who have often landed up in the training sector following voluntary retraining. However, this apparent uniformity conceals a diversity of choices made by the training organisations (TOs) with respect to staff qualifications and contract type. At one of the sites, the TO requires its staff to be functionally flexible. Thus the social support worker takes on the role of trainer, devoting one half-day a week to her support role and the rest of her schedule to training proper. Conversely, at the other sites surveyed, the social support and training functions are quite separate and carried out by different employees who are properly qualified for their respective roles (psychologist and employment advisor). 

These workers are employed on different types of contract. While one of the TOs surveyed has joined the scheme with a stable team employed on open- ended (permanent) contracts, this is less true at the other sites. In one case, the organisation has opted for fixed-term contracts because of the financial constraints and the difficulties of recruiting staff in rural areas. In the other case, the TO routinely offers fixed-term contracts that run for periods of time shorter than the average duration of the support provided for course participants, which accounts for the high level of staff turnover. However, the professionals require a certain degree of stability if they are to forge relationships of trust and acquire a good knowledge of the resources available in their areas, both of which are prerequisites for the provision of effective support. 

The second set of factors giving rise to variations in the support provided is the relative diversity of the target populations in terms of age, gender and labour market experience. As well as individuals who are far removed from the labour market**, other participants tend rather to be on its margins, having had recurrent periods of precarious, poorly paid employment, while a third category consists of early school leavers who have just quit the education system. In other words, the groups regarded as “excluded from the labour market” do not constitute a homogeneous category. There are sub-groups within it who do not perceive the scheme in the same way. For the first and third groups, the training provides a reassuring environment within which they can take the time necessary to overcome the obstacles preventing them from accessing employment; the individuals in the second group, however, find themselves in more of an emergency situation, which prevents them from seizing the opportunity to benefit from social support over a long period in order to obtain a qualification. They are more likely than the others to drop out of the scheme quickly if a job opportunity, however precarious, presents itself. This financial emergency is particularly apparent among young women in the process of leaving the parental home or moving in with a partner.

Three types of situations emerge from the survey, depending on these various factors. In the first, the support helps course participants remobilise and gives them a sense of security; in the second, its effects are more limited while in the third it is, on the contrary, demotivating and fails to give participants any sense of security. 

A situation in which the support is experienced as reassuring is characterised by: regular in-depth meetings between the social support worker and participants, tailored to participants’ needs; stable locations and support team; complementary profiles for employment advisers and social support workers; consistency of approach between the training centre’s professional staff and those providing support externally. For example, while the employment advisers offer course participants guidance on how to put together their CVs and draft their accompanying letters, the social support workers focus, during bilateral interviews, on participants’ skills, attributes and the peripheral obstacles to training and employment. 

This collaboration between advisers and support workers continues with the professionals (social workers or specialist instructors) who provide participants with support outside the training organisations. Early school leavers and the long- term unemployed are the main recipients of this type of support, which enables them to mobilise or remobilise their resources, and to construct or reconstruct their career plans in order to picture themselves on a training course, in an occupation or in a job. 

The situation in which the support has only limited effects has certain similarities with the previous one in terms of the stability of the professional staff and the consistency of the various interventions. However, it has only limited effects because of the participants’ early departure from the course. Regardless of the quality of the training, two categories of participants in particular are involved in these early departures. For some, the initial enthusiasm and mobilisation they experience on entry into the scheme give way to feelings of demotivation resulting from a loss of meaning or thwarted plans. The group most affected by this comprises male early school leavers unable to motivate themselves to construct yet another career plan after repeated failures. For others, a sharp conflict arises between staying on this trajectory towards a training programme and leaving for a job that pays more money than the scheme can offer. This is more likely to happen in the case of young women who are changing their plans, deciding to cohabit with a partner and leaving the scheme for better paid work. Despite their departure, they all declare themselves satisfied with the support they received during their time in the scheme. The support proves to be unsettling when the implementation of the scheme is characterised by inconsistencies and dysfunctions. The turnover among training centre staff and their deployment to different functions, as well as the irregular meetings, changes in schedules and the regular arrivals of new staff are demotivating and unsettling factors for all course participants, and particularly for those experiencing psychological social, economic and work-related difficulties. The scheme then no longer makes any sense. In all cases, this type of support quickly leads participants to the exit door.

TIn the case of this trial scheme, the integrated social support clearly emerges as a key element and both staff and course participants are agreed that this function should be insourced. However, its success is not automatic. It functions at its best when the training organisations offer their employees stable employment conditions, favour complementarity of functions over the deployment of staff to a range of different roles, dedicate staff with specific skills to this function and coordinate the support measures in such a way as to ensure consistency with those implemented by other professionals both inside and outside the training organisations in order to offer scheme participants wide-ranging support.

[1] P-Y. Bernard, V. Gosseaume, K. Meslin, M. , Roupnel-Fuentes, J. Walker, Évaluation qualitative du dispositif Prépa Rebond Dispositif intégré en Pays de la Loire, Rap- port final, DARES, 2022. 

[2] A. Arbelaez Ayala, A. Bucher, P. Givord, L Lima, M. Morel, Troi- sième rapport scientifique de l’évaluation du Plan d’investisse- ment dans les compétences », DARES, 2022