Projects

This project has been funded by the Charity of Sir Richard Whittington and is part of the Mercers’ Company Early Years special initiative. It is evaluating a 10-week intervention to upskill Early Years practitioners with the confidence, knowledge & skills to help parents encourage the foundations of STEM through everyday activities and interactions, and to support STEM skills in their settings. The project is being delivered by Peeple in collaboration with the University of Oxford and Sheringham nursery. The project is taking place from April 2021 to March 2024 and the evaluation will be using theory of change development, interviews, observations and outcome data analysis.

IES is carrying out an independent evaluation of the delivery of two professional development programmes for mentors in 2020/21 academic year. Through analysis of MI, interviews, surveys, and case studies with mentors, mentees and other stakeholders IES will explore the effectiveness and impact of the training. The evaluation will make use of Kirkpatrick and COM-B to understand the findings

The Future Leaders Fellowships is a pan-UKRI flagship programme which will receive £900 million over the next 11 years, with six funding competitions and up to 550 Fellowships awarded. The programme aims to develop the next generation of research and innovation leaders through supporting: high quality and impactful research, increased engagement between industry and academia, increased multi and interdisciplinary research and innovation, and a more equal, diverse and inclusive research and innovation workforce. It provides sustained funding for fellows (up to seven years) and supports careers across all subjects and sectors including academia, industry and the public sector. More information on Future Leaders Fellowships can be found here. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is committed to undertaking a rigorous evaluation of the programme, which will identify outcomes and support conclusions about its longer-term impact. However, evaluating the contribution of the FLF against its aims brings particular challenges. To best address and account for these challenges in the programme evaluation, UKRI commissioned the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) and Professor Marc Cowling (University of Derby) to undertake a pre-evaluation stage study to scope the issues and explore the feasibility of various evaluation approaches. This scoping and feasibility study will run from November 2020 to March 2021 and provide recommendations for the full external evaluation. The study involves a number of elements. At its core is engagement with expert stakeholders within the research and innovation community including evaluation experts and those involved in developing and implementing the Future Leaders Fellowships programme. This will take place through a series of workshops, surveys and meetings. Other activities include: mapping programmes aimed at developing research and innovation capability in the UK, particularly those aimed at early career researchers and developing research leaders across academia and industry; a review and critique of monitoring and evaluation approaches including those used to evaluate researcher development programmes; a review of programme documentation, and analysis of programme monitoring data and wider data to provide a baseline to measure progress; and scoping of potential data sources to produce indicators and impact measures.

IES is carrying out an evaluation of a Tips by Text intervention for The Education Endowment Foundation which is being trialled in 2019/2020 and into the 2020/21 school year. Tips by Text is a behavioural nudge intervention, which uses texts sent to parents to try to improve child outcomes in literacy, numeracy and social development. The project will include an evaluation of outcomes and a process and implementation evaluation.

Taking a co-production approach, IES is supporting the NHS in scoping the evaluation of team coaching pilots in GP practices and Primary Care Networks (PCN’s). Acting as an expert advisor and ‘critical friend’ IES is bringing to bear our expert knowledge of coaching, evaluation and changing working practices throoughout the scoping process. We are also drafting an evaluation logic model, aligned to the proposed programme methodology.

This project aims to support The Sutton Trust, in better understanding how existing evaluation reports sit together and the best way for them to move forward with their future evaluation activity. The project will also involve analysing data on programme participants to understand the impact on HE progression and success.

IES is supporting the Careers Research and Advisory Centre (CRAC) with an evaluation investigating the impact of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s research support programmes and developing a methodology for career tracking of participants. IES will design a methodology and create materials for tracking programme alumni and deliver an alumni survey, as well as supporting CRAC with interviews.

This project is a pilot evaluation of an intervention using the Early Years Toolbox developed by Professor Melhish as an assessment tool for early years practitioners alongside additional support from Action for Children. The intervention seeks to improve practitioner practice, behaviour and confidence in targeting support for children in language, numeracy, social development and self-regulation and ultimately to lead to improvements in child outcomes. This evaluation will include theory of change workshops, nursery case studies, telephone interviews, practitioner online surveys, observations of training and child outcome data analysis.

IES is evaluating the Construction Industry Training Board’s On-Site Training Hubs programme. There are around 20 training hubs in England, located on home-building and infrastructure sites. The hubs are training new entrants to the construction industry, ideally more quickly than other training routes, in order to help tackle skills shortages. Our evaluation has a detailed scoping phase, during which we’ll visit each of the hubs to find out about their approach. We’ll then design an evaluation framework, which will likely include case-study research, an online survey of trainees and analysis of management information data. It’s a two-year project and is one of the National Retraining Schemes included in the government’s Industrial Strategy.

IES evaluated Mind’s latest Blue Light initiative which involved mental health and wellbeing training for new recruits in the emergency services. The work involved training observations, qualitative interviewing, focus groups and a census-type survey. We explored issues specific to new recruits in order that Mind could tailor its training to this cohort.