29/05/2025
By Matt Ambrose FIEP | Project Manager Consultant | Project DEEP | Centre of Excellence UK
Since its launch on June 1, 2024, Project DEEP (Delivering Excellence in Employability Practice) has steadily progressed as a groundbreaking collaboration between the IEP and Serco. This two-year initiative continues to deliver on its mission to elevate employability practices across the sector, ensuring tangible improvements in outcomes for both participants and practitioners.
Serco formally adopted the IEP Quality Improvement Framework (QIF) as its self-assessment tool for quality assurance on the Restart Scheme in late 2024.
We wanted to ensure that we had as many voices as possible contributing to the assessment, whilst being able to meet the requirement of submitting a single rating against each measure. To this end, we created an assessment spreadsheet, which allowed multiple departments within the Employability team to capture both the narrative information and their own ratings against each measure. This was then provided to functional leads for completion, ensuring views from Supply Chain Management, Direct Delivery Operations, Employer Engagement, Delivery Assurance, Performance Excellence and Partnership Management were represented in the assessment.
On completion, the functional leads then met for a workshop day, where each measure (and the feedback supplied against it) were discussed before arriving at a joint rating. On completion of this exercise, the final ratings were then added to Mesma Quality Platform to complete the assessment, along with the narrative information supplied by each department. Our next step is to assign actions against the priority areas for improvement, which we will then record in, and manage through, the Mesma platform.
Overall, the experience has been very positive, and more importantly, the assessment has shone a clear light on areas where Serco and its suppliers can quickly take action to improve the quality of service delivery offered to Participants. There have also been some learnings:
- Timing is key. We required completion within a relatively tight window, but due to operational pressures, the original deadline needed to be extended.
- Ensuring good understanding of the benefits of completing the exercise is critical. The importance placed on the assessment varied between departments and was clear to see in the depth of the responses provided.
- Moderating many departmental scores to find a common rating does not always get to the right result. The number of measures sitting in Amber may well be a result of defaulting to the ‘middle ground’ where there is disagreement.
- There is another step between Assessment and Action Planning. Prioritising many measures with identical scores (Mesma uses RAG ratings, not a numerical score) is required before building an effective Action Plan.
In summary, our experience of using the QIF so far is that it is well targeted, easy to understand, and an effective tool for self-assessment. We look forward to reporting back on the improvements when we assess again later in the year.
