Celebrating collaboration: how Restart providers have come together to overcome barriers to employer engagement

Blog posts

16 Jul 2025

Emily Kramers, Research Fellow
Rosie Gloster, Deputy Director, Public Policy Research

The ReAct Partnership is an industry-led, active collaboration to support a continuous improvement community in the Restart programme. It is funded by the prime providers for the Restart programme and is managed by the Institute for Employment Studies (IES), working alongside the Institute for Employability Professionals (IEP) and the Employment Related Services Association (ERSA). The partnership conducts research projects several times a year that feed knowledge and insight back into the operational teams behind the Restart programme.

The latest of these projects looked at the Prime Provider Network, a forum set up between the prime providers to foster a collaborative approach to engaging large and national employers. This group aims to overcome the barriers that regional contracting may bring to employers with a cross-regional footprint where different organisations hold the contracts across those regions. The benefits for employers from the collaborative working of the prime contractors include gaining national coverage from a single point of contact, reducing the number of contacts with employer support providers and creating efficiencies in disseminating their preferred ways of working. Employers sometimes find the employment support landscape confusing and having a clear route into engaging with employment support can help employers create savings in recruitment costs as well as find a route into hiring with a social value agenda.

But where’s the value for the prime contractors? Working in this way can help providers meet employer needs by sharing access to vacancies and increase routes to work for Restart participants, smoothing the onboarding of new employers through a warm handover, strengthening the offer for employers by providing a wider talent pool, and in some cases opening the door to a range of employment programmes via a single contact.

One of the key benefits for members of the group was the way in which the collaboration contributes to knowledge building through:

• Creating opportunities to meet employers and understand their needs and ways of working.
• Creating opportunities to share best practice and expand knowledge, including expertise about participant support needs in different regions.
• Creating opportunities for sharing and discussing the implications of labour market insight.

In interviews with members of the forum we heard repeatedly that sharing knowledge and best practice, and therefore building their knowledge base, was one of the most impactful benefits of being part of the group.

The research looked at what makes this way of working successful. Key enablers included:

• The culture of collaboration underpinning activity
• Rotating the Chair position among group members
• Having an independent and neutral organisation facilitating the group
• A mix of face-to-face and online meetings to enhance relationship building and facilitate deeper discussion
• Attendance at meetings by key stakeholders and especially by employers to understand and learn from their perspectives.

As with most innovative practices, this venture has not been without its challenges.

Not least how to articulate and evidence the value of the collaboration to wider stakeholders which can make it difficult to advocate for this way of working. Not only has it been hard to evidence the value to the outcomes of service users, but it’s also been hard to articulate the value of the knowledge-building benefits outlined above.

A lack of a technological tracking system has contributed to the first of these issues and a lack of a framework for understanding other benefits has contributed to the latter. Add to this the short-term commissioning model, which sits at odds with a long-term relationship building model, plus inevitable variance of process across organisations, and it’s clear that there remain a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out. But the research revealed a clear commitment to deal with these challenges and build on the success of the model over the next phase of Restart. And indeed, a keenness to exemplify this way of working and the learning it can bring to other employer engagement initiatives.

The commissioning process for delivery of contracted employment services tends to set up a competitive scenario between contractors. Which makes it even more impressive that this group has engendered such a collaborative culture. This sort of collaborative competition has been referred to as ‘coopetition’ reflecting the cooperation that takes place within the competitive environment. The positive response from this forum for collaboration is pointing towards emerging benefits. Future commissioners could consider building this type of joint working into the commissioning model, and work with providers to establish a framework for effective collaboration.

Subscribe to blog posts

Any views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Institute as a whole.