The ReAct partnership: showcasing collaboration

The Restart prime providers sponsored the ERSA conference in November 2025. In the conference run up, the ReAct partnership released a series of briefing papers highlighting key research from the collaboration and how the insights can inform solutions to Get Britain Working. This final briefing paper in the autumn series focuses on the ReAct collaboration itself and what value this has brought to participating organisations and the participants they support.

The ReAct partnership has developed a collaborative working model that has added value at a national level, both for employment service providers and for employers, and insights can be drawn from this collaboration to inform devolved commissioning of employment support. This briefing paper focuses on celebrating what the partnership has achieved through collaboration and how that can inform what comes next to support Get Britain Working.

This briefing paper looks at the impact of collaboration across senior leaders, employers, frontline staff and participants. It considers the lessons that can be learned from ReAct, as well as the challenges of this way of working. The changes needed and the challenges involved in securing the 80% employment targets under Get Britain Working are too complex for any one organisation to solve alone. Provider collaboration will be an imperative to deliver the improved system of the future, through shared learning and understanding and fostering a culture of shared purpose. ReAct has demonstrated that collaboration between competitors creates shared value, and what has worked nationally can inspire local frameworks, with ReAct collaboration as the blueprint.

The ReAct Partnership is an industry-led, active collaboration to support a continuous improvement community in the Restart programme through action research, shared and iterative learning, and the development of applied, evidence-based resources. The Partnership is co-funded by the eight ‘prime providers’ for the Restart programme — FedCap Employment, AKG, G4S, Ingeus, Maximus, Reed, Seetec and Serco — and is being managed by the Institute of Employment Studies (IES), working alongside the Institute for Employability Professionals (IEP) and the Employment Related Services Association (ERSA).