Projects

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, in partnership with Employment Research Ltd, will conduct the Bar Council Working Lives 2020 survey. IES/ERL will survey barristers using details form the Bar Council’s database, and will analyse the survey responses to provide the latest picture of working conditions in the Bar, and in particular identifying differences between the employed and self-employed Bar, by key demographic and employment situation variables, and looking at changes over time by making comparisons with the earlier surveys.

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.

Working in partership with Ipsos MORI, IES will conduct independent process, impact and economic evaluation of the National Leadership Centre (NLC). The NLC was launched by the Chancellor in 2018 as a threee year pilot and seeks to transform the leadership of public services.

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.

On behalf of the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, IES is designing an impact evaluation of three Housing First pilots, running in Liverpool City Region, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands. The intervention is a response to the 2017 Homelessness Reduction Act which has increased the obligations on local authorities to house all individuals who are currently homeless, or at risk of becoming homeless. Housing First is an approach to supporting rough sleepers into long-term accommodation, putting an emphasis on finding individuals a secure and affordable home to live in, as opposed to hostel-based accommodation, while providing them with expert support to rebuild their lives, including support aimed at labour market participation. Housing First was developed in the US in the 1990s and has been shown to be effective there and in a number of European countries. The pilots will test the effectiveness of Housing First in the English context. Our evaluation will be co-designed with the pilot sites. IES’ role will be to lead the design of an impact evaluation using linked administrative datasets. Find out more about the three Housing First pilot projects on the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government website.

In partnership with Ecorys Netherlands and on behalf of the Executive Agency for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (EASME), we will explore the productivity and business benefits of occupational health and safety (OSH) good practice in the construction sector. The project as a whole will give particular focus to smaller employers who do not always perceive a link between OSH and their bottom-line. IES will contribute UK case-study fieldwork and will lead on an evidence-mapping (desk review) exercise. This work builds on our analysis of the links between wellbeing and productivity, on behalf of EEF, the manufacturers’ organisation.

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.

IES is conducting: a review of mental health training to determine the best topics to train line managers in, the best method(s) of delivering the training and the best means of measuring beneficial impacts; and an evaluation of two types of training selected on the basis of review recommendations, using a control group for comparison. The training will be based on existing training packages and samples of participants will be drawn from various areas of the rail industry.