Projects

Line manager training (full day) and one 2 hour online session for Senior Management Team of CIOT.

IES will be evaluating a trial of the JobsPlus initiative, a place-based employment programme to support residents living in social housing.

YFF is providing a grant to IES to explore the policies and services that support young people (14-30) on their journey to work and understand how they are tracked. Through desk research, stakeholder interviews and with support from a youth and an expert panel, IES will aim to understand how young people experience the current landscape of policy and what might work better. The desk research will map relevant policies for young people in four typologies - care experienced, experience of the youth justice system, young people with mental ill-health and young people with special educational needs. The research will also map data that track young people across the age range, by examining datasets and understanding challenges and opportunities associated with the data from the data owners. The findings will help YFF to identify where changes could be made to improve outcomes and tracking, especially useful for YFF's future programmes.

Following on from the desk based research and stakeholder interviews, this research aims to gather the views of employers and participants in Skills Bootcamps. For employers, we will explore how they anticipate demand for skills and decide on Skills Bootcamps as a suitable approach for their skills needs. For participant, we will explore how they decided that a Skills Bootcamp was the right option for them, comparing the views of employed and unemployed particpants.

A DfE-funded mixed method evaluation of the new Strategic Language Networks, Language Assistants, German Promotion Project and UK-German Connection programmes aiming to promote and increase take-up of language learning among Key stages 2 and 3 and to improve the quality of language teacher. It comprises an implementation and process evaluation with surveys, interviews and case study visits with observations.

A mixed model research including an employer survey and employer case studies. The research aims to find elements of employer best practice to help support employees in the workplace living with cancer.

Conducting a mixed methods evaluation of Apps for Good’s App for Social Action course. Aims are to develop and refine Apps for Good’s theory of change and approach to monitoring and data collection, to support Apps for Good to move beyond the measurement of short-term outcomes to measuring long-term outcomes, and to provide independent, formative feedback to feed in learning for ongoing improvement of the App for Social Action course.

IES with Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI) and Monash University are leading evidence syntheses for Youth Futures to feed into the development of a second edition of the Youth Employment Toolkit. The Toolkit will continue to support practitioners, employers and policy makers to apply high-quality evidence on what works to improve employment outcomes, especially for marginalised youth. This edition of the Toolkit will include findings from four interventions that were not included previously as well as any additional findings from interventions included previously (if new evidence has become available). Research will initially involve a scoping phase in which topics for this edition of the Toolkit will be agreed upon and any fine-tuning of the accompanying network meta-analysis will be described. Following the scoping phase, research will include a review of the literature as well as the completion of a protocol and technical report.

Qualitative research with young people and employers to develop an intervention pathway for employers to support healthy lifestyles in the workplace. Industries of focus will be: leisure and food, health and social care, education, and construction.

This study considered the feasibility of trialling a new self-employment support intervention with young people not in employment, education or training (NEET). The rationale was that self-employment might provide a meaningful way forward for young people who otherwise might struggle to find work for a range of reasons including low qualifications, lack of experience, discrimination, caring responsibilities, poor health and weak local labour market. An underlying premise was that self-employment might provide the flexibility required to accommodate these characteristics and constraints. Working with Professor Richard Dorsett and colleagues at the University of Westminster, the team completed extensive data analysis, a targeted literature review and a series of consultations involving self-employment support providers and young people. From this, a new comprehensive model for self-employment support was designed suitable for young people NEET in a range of contexts. Alongside this, a trial protocol was developed which describes how this intervention can be tested through a randomised controlled trial.