We wrote a short confidential report for a national training provider to understand current and future European Social Fund (ESF) opportunities. The early tasks for the assignment involved a brief review of the EU policy context including a summary of relevant parts of the UK Draft Partnership Agreement and Welsh, Scottish and English ESF programmes 2013-2014 setting out funding and priorities. The scope and scale of planned activity across the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) network and in Scotland and Wales and the distribution of funding by Thematic Objective was also outlined (These are now referred to as Priority Axis and Investment Priorities). We offered a resume of Youth Employment Initiative expenditure – a special measure directly from Brussels to tackle this major EU concern. We then painstakingly assembled a matrix of activity priorities by LEP area and opt-ins to national programmes. The final part of the work provided summary headlines of principal ESF priorities to 2020 including an accompanying excel summary sheet for reference.

After reading the report the client sent us a note saying “I’m super pleased with the report! It makes sense, is logical and structured. Thank you so much. It will become invaluable I’m sure and has already massively helped my thinking”.

“UK ESF will account for a minimum of €4.9 billion (£3.9bn) in 2014-2020.”

~ Kada ESF Scoping Study, 2014