City Strategy Pathfinder Evaluation

The City Strategy is an innovative strategy aimed at addressing the problem of persistently high levels of worklessness found in certain areas. Local consortia made up of public, private and voluntary organisations in 15 areas throughout England, Scotland and Wales were created to bring local knowledge to bear on the problem and provide new ideas for potential use elsewhere. A key aspect of the City Strategy is that it seeks to empower local institutions to develop local solutions. It is envisaged that such an approach will give local stakeholders the freedom to innovate, and the flexibility to work together to combine and align their efforts behind shared priorities. Each City Strategy Pathfinder (CSP) undertook its own local evaluation. IES was commissioned as an Area Evaluation Adviser to three of the fifteen CSPs. The aim of this role was to ensure that the CSP local evaluations were undertaken effectively and that they contributed towards the national evaluation of the CSPs, which was carried out by the Institute for Employment Research (IER) at University of Warwick.

Project details

Client	Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
Year	2007
IES contact	Nigel Meager
Research partners	Shared Intelligence, Centre for Region, Economic and Social Research