Returners Grant Fund evaluation
Client: Government Equalities Office
People with caring responsibilities face additional barriers when they want to return to work after a period away from paid employment. Many value additional support to help them, and their families, make that transition. Over a three year period the Government Equalities Office ran a set of 16 diverse projects that aimed to do just that. The projects were based across England and worked with returners (often, but not exclusively, women) from diverse communities including those in rural areas, deprived urban areas, returners with professional qualifications and those with low or no skills, migrants and refugees, and people with partners in the armed forces.
Several of the projects were still delivering as the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdown impacted people’s lives. Projects had to shift rapidly from supporting carers to leave the home to find work, to supporting them with home-schooling, mental health or finding other forms of work.
SQW worked alongside the team to design and deliver a formative and summative evaluation that shared lessons from different phases of the project as it developed, and culminated in a programme wide evaluation report.
Lessons from the programme have been published based on individual accounts of each of the sixteen projects. The report can be found here.
