Our discovery on barriers and routes to employment for refugees and asylum seekers
This blogpost is the second in a series about the Refugee Social Enterprise project. If you want to learn more about it, you can read the introduction to the project here.
A discovery is the first phase of a design project, where you first find out what your users need. This is important, because we want to build a service that is useful to our users, in this case, refugees and asylum seekers. This is about our first discovery in March 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then we also decided to run a second discovery in August 2020, to find what had changed for refugees and asylum seekers since lockdown.
The questions for this discovery were:
How are British Red Cross supporting refugees and asylum seekers to get voluntary or paid work?
How are social enterprises supporting refugees and asylum seekers to get voluntary or paid work?
What are barriers and pathways to volunteering or paid work for refugees and asylum seekers?
A number of organisations have already carried out significant research on barriers to employment, including Breaking Barriers and Refugee Enterprise Network (REN) — their findings helped us to plan and decide who it would be helpful to speak to first.
We spoke to 14 British Red Cross Service Managers across 11 out of 12 regions of the UK to help us to understand existing employability and volunteering support.
We also spoke to 9 asylum seekers, 7 refugees, 15 frontline staff and 3 external organisations in England, Scotland and Wales to gain a deeper understanding of barriers and routes into volunteering, voluntary work and paid work.
A note on work permissions
Asylum seekers are people who have left their home country due to war or persecution and have made an application to live in the UK. They are paid £37.50 a week and provided with accommodation, while their application (asylum claim) is considered by the Home Office. While waiting, they are not permitted to do paid work. They can however volunteer for charitable or public sector organisations.
Refugees are people who have made asylum claims and been granted leave to remain in the UK by the Home Office. They are permitted to have paid work and have access to the same support as all other UK citizens.
What are we already doing at British Red Cross?
One part of our work at the British Red Cross is to support refugees and asylum seekers with a focus on destitution support, one example being Hackney Destitution Resource Centre in London. Our key learnings from speaking with refugee services staff from 11 of the 12 regions in the UK were as follows:
- Frontline staff across all regions recognised employability and volunteering opportunities would benefit service users but were limited by staff capacity in being able to offer this type of support.
- Most regions signpost to local partners for employability skills.
- Volunteering opportunities are region dependent, with some services offering in-house placements.
- The few regions that offer employability skills programmes are small in scale and on a case-by-case basis.
What are social enterprises doing?
Over the past few years, a number of social enterprises focussed on refugees have sprung into action. As our intention is to create a social enterprise, we decided to speak directly to inspiring organisations who offer both employability support and work experience, be it volunteering or paid work, so we met with Breadwinners, Mo’s Eggs and Migrateful. We also spoke to Social Bites cafe, in Glasgow who support people experiencing homelessness. These meetings helped us understand what ways of working were effective and offers we might need to build into a service we design, for example, emotional support.
- Programmes provide skills that are also transferrable to future employment opportunities.
- English language skills and confidence improved as people interacted with English speaking customers in their roles.
- Where mentoring was offered, it was highly valued as it offered individual guidance on next steps.
- All organisations provided a social network, through which people had found out about other employment opportunities.
- Challenges included having the correct processes and training in place and ways to support those less confident in English.
The value of employment
Human beings are meaning making creatures. We need to have a sense of purpose to our days in order to thrive. Research on unemployment carried out by the Institute for Work and Health supports our findings below. All asylum seekers and most refugees we interviewed told us the reasons work was important to them was because it provided:
- A sense of purpose
- Improved mental health
- Opportunities for personal growth and learning new skills
Barriers to employment: volunteering or paid work
Refugees, asylum seekers and staff we spoke to highlighted eight inter-related barriers to volunteering and paid work in England, Wales and Scotland.
1. English: technical language related to the workplace
“I work with lots of men who struggle to find work as their English is not fluent. Employers also worry about that from a health and safety perspective, as they want them to understand the all signs in the factory”.
Simon, caseworker, British Red Cross
2. Mental ill health
“Mental health is a big barrier and a taboo back in Syria so people just don’t talk about it”.
Akram, refugee, Wales
“Social isolation — it is so hard to get out of this after being in it for so long, my motivation is low and I lost my dignity when I could not work during the asylum process”.
Michael, asylum seeker, England
3. Knowledge of the processes of applying for a job in the UK
“I did not know where or how to look for jobs, how interviews were structured, how to write a cover letter — its different to my home country”.
Julie, refugee, England
4. Confidence and ‘selling yourself’
“An internalised belief they are ‘foreign’ and can’t apply because of their accent and a lack of confidence”.
Raymond, caseworker, England
“My case worker says I have to keep referring to ‘I’ in an interview. I’m very uncomfortable doing that — in Sudan, that would be seen as arrogant”.
Isa, asylum seeker, Scotland
5. Racism or discrimination
“Being judged by the way you look. My friend who had a headscarf, she thought that she wasn’t hired as a charity shop volunteer because she had a headscarf”.
Dina, asylum seeker, Wales
“Feeling like they are trying to get you to leave by making it hard for you to live here”.
Mary, asylum seeker, Wales
6. Access to or knowledge of technology
“Computer skills are a major barrier for a lot of people”.
Tim, caseworker, Scotland
7. No previous work experience and a requirement for references
“I am a radiographer — I have been turned down for jobs as I have no UK work experience but no one is giving me a chance to get UK work experience”.
Azam, refugee, Wales
8. A need for accredited certificates
“I was a successful hairdresser back home, but I don’t have the qualifications to prove it so people won’t give me work”.
Leni, refugee, Wales
Routes to employment: volunteering or paid work
We also learnt about innovative ways that people had managed to overcome barriers to employment. The three most cited were:
- Volunteering with voluntary, public sector or community organisations
- Through their social networks
- Support from a dedicated staff member who had knowledge of applications and routes to employment
Often people described journeys to a role which involved a combination of the above, for example, a role in a charity shop, had led them to making a new friend, who then recommended them to an employability programme which provided people with mentors.
Ideas suggested by several included: “Just turn up and ask”, hearing success stories from peers, FaceBook Job Fairs and attending community events.
Summary
The main barriers to volunteering and paid work for refugees and asylum seekers are English language ability, specifically technical language, mental health, knowledge of the job application process, confidence and ability to ‘sell yourself’, racism or discrimination and access to or knowledge of technology. Lack of previous work experience, references or not holding accredited certificates also contributed to difficulties in accessing a paid role.
The most helpful routes into work were through social networks, support from dedicated individuals, such as mentors, who provided person-centred support with applications, and volunteering.
The value of employment is not to be underestimated, a sense of purpose, improved mental health and personal growth were reasons cited by the majority we interviewed.
What happens next?
After this discovery, we had to put the project on pause due to the British Red Cross’ response to the pandemic. We have now restarted the project. If you would like to learn more about the second discovery or what we are doing next, you can follow our blog.
