Does anyone here have experence with the restart scheme?

Not as such, IIRC from some research it is a way for 3rd party companies to place you in courses which don't help with finding consistent employment. The problem with these schemes is that they don't address unemployment issues - you are more or less a number and once you get put into a job, that fills the daily or weekly quota and that's it.

My previous job was a Kickstart Scheme (then after 6 months a permanent job) as an admin assistant for a care provider and I left in Sep 2023 for a full-time council based role as a receptionist (which I am still at today). From personal experience my Kickstart job was awful due to poor management, not only were you expected to take on a lot of responsibility for minimum wage, you had no guarantee of a permanent job. 

I unfortunately witnessed a lot of dodgy practices especially relating to management pocketing money for employee expenses (which they used to fund holidays IIRC), that and over 20 Kickstarters were sacked for failing to work when it was the management's fault for not giving work in the first place. I was in charge of managing this group and continuously pushed management to place candidates in shifts but they would turn their nose up and say "NO" to all of them.

Training was also lacking, myself and an ex-colleague who is a friend of mine and a former Kickstart candidate had to rely on our senior admin for training (even though they only did 20 hours a week due to childcare); my senior tried the best she could to train us but there was pressure from management to do it all. If she wasn't in, my ex-colleague and I had to use trial and error to figure out what to do half the time. I used to train admin staff myself even when I was fairly new to my role and once my team decreased due to colleagues leaving, I trained permanent staff who got £2+ more than me and had no English speaking skills (to note after Dec 2022, the care homes my managers liaised with at the time outsourced shifts to their own staff and there was next to no work so some permanent staff on visa sponsorships got placed in admin). I had a lot of stress issues and was signed off due to depression, caused by this job and bereavement. To sum up, managers didn't care and were fixated on instant results + clawing back money by charging staff for their own training, travel, DBS and even uniforms.

I had a friend who was also on a Kickstart Scheme job and IIRC she quit because she never got paid on time (I also had this experience + at least a year's worth of missing pension contributions and had to report to ACAs). From experience, the Scheme benefitted employers because they could get away with hiring younger people on the cheap and rotating between groups of candidates which was happened in my previous workplace. Also, younger people tend to be easier to exploit.

*happening (typo)

*happening (typo)

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