City Region Deal launches Covid-19 Job Support

A Job matching service has launched today for the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region, in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The COVID-19 Job Support website will match live vacancies with job seekers who have registered for alerts. Information and support advice for employers, employees and jobseekers will also be available.

The City Region Deal partnership had been developing a job matching website, but fast-tracked the plans in response to the pandemic.

East Lothian Cllr Norman Hampshire, Chair of the City Region Deal’s Joint Committee, said: “We’re committed to using our collective strengths and resources to help the region recover and respond to the huge challenge that COVID-19 has created. The job support website marks the first of what I hope will be more initiatives that our City Region Deal network can quickly mobilise to help employees and job-seekers in the coming months.”

There are immediate job opportunities across the City Region in essential and sudden-growth sectors, including the NHS, supermarkets, home deliveries, take-away food and beverages.

Steve Grimmond, Chief Executive of Fife Council and Chair of the City Region Deal’s Skills and Employability group, commented: “Thanks to the agility and dedication of all our partners, I’m delighted we were able to fast-track the job matching service to help mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the City Region’s workforce. I hope the online portal helps meet the urgent needs of both employers and at-risk employees, as well as existing job-seekers.”

The re-purposed site – developed free of charge by Hanlon Software Solutions - will also help capture the scale of the jobs challenge through data collection from those who register. 

Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Infrastructure and Connectivity Michael Matheson said:

“City Region Deals are designed to bring people together to work in partnership and this is a great example of the benefits that can come from those new relationships.

“This initiative will create new connections helping link those seeking work to employers in our vital services ensuring they have the resources required.

“I would like to thank those involved for their quick action and initiative. We would encourage partners in all city regions to look at what they can do to support their local economy and communities through these challenging times.”

The website is available at: www.c19jobs.org

For further information, email: c19jobs@capitalcitypartnership.org

Academic profile: Sarah Galey-Horn

Sarah Galey-Horn is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow in the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education, whose specialist area of research is family social capital and network interventions. The City Region Deal recently spoke to Sarah about how she’s helping to evaluate the Deal’s intensive family support proposals.

Sarah Galey-Horn, University of Edinburgh

Sarah Galey-Horn, University of Edinburgh

How did you get involved with the City Region Deal’s intensive family support work?

I heard about the Train@Ed fellowships and was interested in the opportunity to work in a non-academic setting. After looking into different areas of activity in the City Region Deal, I recognised the intensive family support (IFS) work would be an ideal area to get involved.

I wrote a Train@Ed application based on helping to evaluate the IFS proposals. I have prior experience in network interventions in real-life setting from when I lived in the US, and the City Region Deal IFS project has offered a chance to expand that part of my professional repertoire.

Through this, I’m hoping to build on my previous research in social data use, which is also called ‘network intervention’, within the context of a significant policy intervention. Through colleagues at the University of Edinburgh - who were already involved with the City Region Deal - I contacted the IFS project lead Adam Dunkerley, from Fife Council, and have worked with the team closely since the beginning on the IFS proposal.

How did you become involved in this field of research?

I came to the fellowship from the educational field.  I started as a high school teacher, which I did for five years before going back to school to get my PhD in education policy. In my programme at Michigan State University (MSU) I was fortunate enough to learn from and work with a leading social network scholar, Dr Kenneth Frank, who was also one of my doctoral advisors.

Dr Frank introduced me to network intervention concepts through a lot of his own work. I ended up working on some of his network intervention projects, and not all of them were in education. This gave me a lot of practical experience applying network concepts in policy interventions. It also helped me to learn how to do research outside of my specialisation and work with people from outside of academia.

 Can you provide an overview of the IFS work?

In social and education policy, policy makers tend to focus on individual attributes and measurements, but the problem with that is a lot of the outcomes we are concerned with are the product of complex social phenomenon.

Relationships with other people, are one example. But how do you measure the impact of a relationship? While analysing social networks, which is a widely used method in social science research, is one way. This project uses social network analysis to better understand the influence of relationships on extreme poverty and deprivation in families.

Social networks, such as family relationships, but also workplace relationships and friend circles, are important predictors of individual behaviour because they are conduits for social capital, which are non-material resources. Positive social interactions with others, for example, provide individuals with a sense of meaning, purpose and dignity and provide a barrier against feelings of isolation and rejection associated with economic deprivation. Yet these kinds of social factors are usually not considered by policymakers or programme evaluators when crafting and assessing social programmes; partly, because there has been no way to capture and track social capital empirically.

In part, the IFS programme is about changing that. We want to show how social capital impacts progression for those citizens facing extreme poverty or deprivation and, therefore, that it is a key ingredient for understanding the effectiveness of social policy interventions.

The IFS project is due to start in April 2020, and I’ve been working closely with the lead delivery agency, Capital City Partnership, on how to integrate social network data use. Social network data use has been written into the specifications of the IFS business case.

I’m also working with colleagues at Capital City Partnership and organisations who’ll be delivering the IFS services, helping develop implementation guidelines and training activities. In the longer-term, we are hoping to get funding to develop software for social network data use.

We’re trying to assess the existing IFS measures across the six local authority areas within the City Region Deal, and how we can help to build on that. There will be a period of data collection of about one year before moving on to an initial evaluation of social effects within the IFS programme. We also want to train the relevant service delivery teams in collecting and making use of that data.

What will be the main outcomes?

As far as research goes, the main outcome will be an analysis on the effects of social capital on IFS intervention outcomes. For policymakers, this will provide evidence to support the use of social network analysis to understand the effects of the IFS programme. And I also plan to publish in academic circles as well.

There are practical outcomes are probable but more important and interesting. Mainly that means developing network intervention tools to support service delivery. And that is both at the organisational level and the service delivery level. At the organisational level, we are developing network visualisation techniques to help partners understand how community assets and professional interactions support the IFS programme implementation. Then we want to be able to help IFS use that data to build more supportive and effective networks.

At the practice level, I hope that innovation in practice will be one of the outcomes of increased use of social network data. Social network analysis offers a great model for the study of the diffusion of innovation; how does innovation travel through organisations, why do some people adopt innovation and others not? I want to capture the fact that social workers will be innovating and problem-solving – perhaps not in the traditional technological sense. But innovation can take place in a very practical way in ordinary workplace environments, addressing real-world problems. It’s important to understand small innovations in practice that make a big difference can exist at a micro and localised level – but they can be genius.

This has been a great learning experience for me to find out more about the front-end delivery of social services. Because my previous research has been based on the study of policy interventions, the IFS work has helped me realise the importance of consulting with those at the front-end of delivering services.

Have you ever worked on research for projects within the region where you live before?

This feels like a natural progression for me personally and connects two important areas of my life; my community work for the area I live in and my professional life.

How would you like to develop the work in future?

Further down the road, we want to apply for grant money to scale up our work. If successful in achieving funding for software development, this could be used by social care workers and others. I’m also aiming to develop a series of professional development modules in social network data use. At the end of the process, we hope to have new capabilities to collect this type of data and build a database on social networks. The goal is to have funding secured and modules launched within a year or two of the IFS formally starting.

City Region Deal makes key appointment for data skills targets

The City Region Deal is gearing up to help people across Edinburgh and South East Scotland improve their data skills.

The Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) Skills Gateway has appointed Anna Scott as its Project Delivery Manager, to take the lead on Data Education for Work activities.

ANNA SCOTT - project lead manager

ANNA SCOTT - project lead manager

Anna will be based in The Data Lab, Scotland’s Innovation Centre for Data and AI, but will work with a wide range of stakeholders from across the region, including employers and training providers.

The Data Education for Work project will develop a suite of programmes to help empower at-risk employees and low-paid workforce across the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region to prepare and equip themselves with the skills to take advantage of jobs that will be shaped by data-driven innovation.

Commenting on her new role, Anna said: “I am delighted to be joining the programme at this exciting time and look forward to working with the DDI Skills Gateway team and colleagues at The Data Lab to bring the Data Education for Work programme to life. Automation is changing the way organisations operate and I'm really excited by the opportunity to lead on the development a new employee-focussed skills programme that aims to empower workers in Edinburgh, South East Scotland and beyond to take full advantage of the changing world of work and the data training opportunities available to them to upskill or retrain.”

The DDI Skills Gateway programme is aiming to enhance data literacy across the skills pathway, including working with school pupils, college and university learners and those in work. A range of approaches are being developed including working alongside teachers to enhance the data curriculum in schools, developing short courses for college learners including women returners, and embedding data skills in undergraduate courses.

Anna joins the DDI Skills Gateway from the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (Scotland's ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership), where she led on programmes of activity designed to connect doctoral research with policy and industry. This included working closely with the Scottish Government and Skills Development Scotland on a national internships programme, the creation of a mentoring scheme with the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the delivery of industry-focused skills training initiatives to increase business engagement with the social sciences.

Relevant links:

Universities unveil City Region Deal plan to tackle digital skills gap

Data Science Workshop - Newbattle High School - 033.JPG

The University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University will work together to train 100,000 people in data skills and help 1,000 organisations through data.

The University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University have launched a major initiative that includes plans to improve digital skills across south east Scotland. The new venture is set to transform Edinburgh and its surrounding area into the data capital of Europe.

The £661m Data-Driven Innovation initiative is a key part of the recently-announced Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal. It aims to train 100,000 people in data skills over the next decade, from computer science specialists to traditional jobs that will increasingly use data.

It is estimated that Scotland needs around 13,000 extra workers each year with data skills as the workplace is transformed. The Scottish Government’s Digital Strategy, published in 2017, included plans to tackle this digital skills gap while growing the Scottish economy.

Together, the two universities will increase the provision of data science teaching for their students, and support schools and colleges across the region to provide digital skills teaching and training. The region’s supercomputing capabilities will also be strengthened with investment in a data analysis facility, which will help 1,000 organisations use data to innovate within their sectors.

Secretary of State for Scotland, David Mundell, said:

 This exciting project – backed by £270m of UK Government investment – will ensure that the UK leads the world in technologies of the future and benefits from the economic growth opportunities this brings.

“By giving 100,000 people, and 1,000 companies, the skills and capability they need to drive innovation through big data and artificial intelligence, this partnership working will help maximise the potential of these sectors – a key goal of the UK Government’s Modern Industrial Strategy.”

The Scottish Government’s Secretary for Transport, Infrastructure and Connectivity, Michael Matheson said:

“The £300m Scottish Government investment in the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal will help deliver inclusive economic growth across the region. The Data-Driven Innovation programme will be key to this, providing a significant step-change in our productivity.

“We are working to ensure Scotland is an internationally recognised vibrant, inclusive, open and outward-looking digital nation. I welcome the contribution that Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt Universities are making to ensure the new opportunities and benefits created by City Region Deal investment are spread across the region, providing individuals with the digital skills and aptitudes necessary to succeed while helping industry source the talent they need to grow and flourish.”

Professor Charlie Jeffery, Senior Vice Principal, University of Edinburgh, said:

The University's strengths in data science have been driving innovation in the public and private sectors, for the past decade and more, through our research and the skills our graduates bring into the regional economy. The City Region Deal will now give us the capacity to do much more across a wider range of sectors, including healthcare, robotics and fintech. But perhaps the most important part of the Deal is our commitment to ensure people in the region can build the skills to flourish in the data-driven economy.

“So we are working not just in our universities, but also with schools, colleges and businesses so people have the opportunities to develop data skills across their life-course. This could include young people about to enter the workforce, women returning after career breaks, or people looking to reskill in mid-career. We know that data-driven innovation will bring economic growth - we want that growth to be inclusive and open to all.”

Professor Richard A Williams, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University, said:

“By working in partnership we can ensure our city community can prosper and achieve its obvious potential as the leading international research hub for digital innovation. Our frontier research and educational skills in digital technology and its application in artificial intelligence and robotics are already shaping and driving the future and taking Scottish innovation to the world.”

Jarmo Eskelinen has been appointed to lead the Data-Driven Innovation initiative. He comes to Edinburgh from his previous role as Chief Innovation and Technology Officer of the London-based Future Cities Catapult initiative. Welcoming his new role, Jarmo Eskelinen said:

“Data is the new soil, and collaboration the seeds. The Data-Driven Innovation initiative is unique in its ambition and scale. It’s been designed to reach out to the whole City Region, so we can develop and test new services to meet the needs of our citizens. 

“I am extremely honoured to join the programme team and have the chance to collaborate with and learn from the world-leading experts of the two Universities. I look forward to helping a diverse range of organisations benefit from the fast-developing field of data-driven innovation.”

The £1.3bn Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal was announced by the Prime Minister and First Minister at the University of Edinburgh on 7 August. It aims to drive growth for everyone across the area and includes investment in transport, housing, culture and skills and employability.

Further Information

Data-Driven Innovation website

Data-Driven Innovation launch short video