Housing Associations (HA) are increasingly expected to engage with the Government’s Work Programme and to provide training for work for their tenants, a majority of whom are unemployed. Operating in the space between state, labour market and society, Housing Associations are now at the heart of the employment and skills agenda and in 2010/11, they ran 1,000 projects to tackle worklessness, with more than 200,000 people receiving training.

However little research has focused on this new landscape of training for work or on the experiences and expectations of HA tenants engaging in training.

This project seeks to provide a better understanding of the role of HAs, the social processes and outcomes of training for work and, more widely, the impacts of current policy interventions aimed at engendering social inclusion and ensuring welfare to work.  

The following issues were investigated in detail:

  1. The aims, purpose and potential conflicts of HA training programmes.
  2. The reasons and expectations tenants have for participating in training programmes.
  3. The social and spatial processes, experiences and implications of participation.
  4. The impact participation has on perceptions of further training and/or (re)employment.
  5. The extent to which HA training programmes act as a transformative space through which tenants negotiate and challenge a range of identities and subject positions (benefit claimant, tenant, learner, worker, citizen etc.).

The project is based on interviews and focus groups with tenants who are currently or have recently taken up training for work courses through Housing Associations, as well as interviews with Housing Associations manager and training providers. This project is conducted in collaboration with Catalyst Housing, East Thames and A2Dominion.

The project report can be found here.