NEWS - Northumberland Employability and Work Service
also known as: Northumberland Employability and Work Service.
The Northumberland Employability and Work Service (NEWS) provides both a strategic and a delivery lead in employability for Northumberland County Council.
What is NEWS?
The Northumberland Employability and Work
Service (NEWS) is part of the Children’s Services
Employability and Skills Service. The service delivers a number of
programmes under sub contract or grants to support Northumberland
residents of working age into sustainable employment.
Programmes currently being delivered are:
• DWP Work Programme with Avanta
• DWP Mandatory Work Activity with Ingeus
• Family Wise with the Wise Group
• Support for people seeking work in our ex-coalfield areas
with Coalfields Regeneration Trust.
A team of Employment Coaches and Family Coaches deliver a wide
range of support under these programmes to support our residents to
move from welfare and into work. The main team base is at the Arch
Centre for Enterprise in Ashington but delivery is from a range of
locations across the county. The support in these programmes
includes information, advice and guidance, help with job searches,
action planning, access to training, employability skills, travel
planning and anything else needed to help people into work. The
team works with a wide range of partner organisations to ensure
comprehensive support of good quality is available to support our
residents.
Alongside programme delivery NEWS promotes employability as a
key driver of services and activities across the local authority
and manages the NEWS Employability Partnership Network. NEWS
recognises that no one organisation or sector can deliver this
agenda alone and supports better co-ordination and higher quality
provision through a partnership approach. Utilising the
strengths of each sector can ensure the best opportunity of
sustaining a strong Northumberland delivery infrastructure.
Working Neighbourhoods Fund
Government introduced the Working
Neighbourhoods Fund (WNF) supported local authority
efforts to tackle worklessness and low levels of skills and
enterprise in the most disadvantaged areas of the country.
Northumberland County Council allocated £2m of WNF for
commissioning activities over 2009-11 to achieve a reduction in
worklessness in the most deprived parts of the county. Local
public, private and third sector organisations were commissioned to
deliver a co-ordinated package of projects in partnership with
the Northumberland Employability and Work Service (NEWS) to support
Northumberland residents to progress toward finding sustainable
work.
The programme ran from October 2009 to March
2011.
Contact Information
Kevin Higgins
Employability Development Manager
Tel: 01670 622802
Mob: 07786 020787
Email: kevin.higgins@northumberland.gov.uk
