The European Social Fund (ESF) invests significant resources in the human capital of the EU, supporting better jobs for all and a more inclusive society. It is crucial to ensure that these funds are spent efficiently and effectively. Accordingly, the Cohesion Policy Regulations 2014-2020 strengthened monitoring and evaluation requirements (compared to previous programming periods) through an emphasis on a reinforced intervention logic, a result-oriented approach and strengthened system of indicators. These changes have improved accountability through the availability of more reliable data for monitoring and evaluation, but there are still some areas for advancement. Notably, these relate to the use of programme-specific indicators (i.e. indicators defined by managing authorities and that are not included in the list of common indicators defined by the ESF Regulation), which cannot easily be aggregated beyond the programme level, and the limited use of "soft" indicators to measure more intangible, but important, results. This means that the current data cannot fully capture the achievements, particularly at an aggregate level. In addition, the substantial additional funds made available to Member States in order to address the heavy consequences of the COVID-19 crisis led to new areas of intervention initially not fully covered by the existing ESF indicators. For this reason, the Commission issued a non-paper in mid-2020, setting out a set of new COVID-19 programme-specific indicators2. The use of these COVID-19 indicators is still to be assessed. In this context, the "Study on the pathways to enhance the use of programme-specific indicators in the ESF and ESF+" aimed at: exploring ways of making better use of programme-specific indicators by examining possibilities to group them for analysis, and identifying ways to improve their design; assessing the current use of "soft" result indicators and identify methods for their measurement; assessing the use of COVID-19 programme-specific indicators. The research was based on a list of all programme-specific indicators (PSIs) used in the Operational Programmes (OPs) of ESF and FEAD 2014-2020 and a small sample of indicators selected in draft 2021-2027 ESF+ programmes (as available at end November 2021). The research on soft outcomes included a literature review, a review of existing PSIs, and interviews with ESF and FEAD managing authorities and beneficiaries in five Member States selected for case studies. For the COVID-19 indicators, a review of their use was complemented with an online survey and bilateral exchanges with managing authorities. The different strands of work were complemented by an online EU-level focus group with the participation of managing authorities, beneficiaries, and social partners and the European Commission (EC), in order to discuss the preliminary findings and a set of recommendations.
