Projects

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) commissioned a project to pilot a strategic approach to evaluating the outcomes of learning and development in BIS and assess how far such an approach could be more widely applied to other programmes and in other business contexts.

In 2015 the DWP launched the Fit for Work service to provide occupational health assessment and health and work advice to employees, employers and GPs in order to help employees return to or stay in work after a long-term (over four-week) period of absence due to ill-health. The Institute was awarded the contract to evaluate the new service, in partnership with GfK NOP, over a period of over two years. The study includes an investigation of the feasibility of estimating the economic impact of the new service, as well as an examination of how the new service is being delivered and its engagement with employees, employers and GPs.

Jobcentre Plus (JCP), in partnership with local authorities (LAs), implemented a new approach to providing support for 16-17 year olds not in education, employment or training (NEET) and not in receipt of an income-based benefit. The approach saw trained work coaches help young people navigate the services available to them and link with local employment and training opportunities. The aim of the pilot was for JCP to enhance the existing offer that LAs and Voluntary and Community Service (VCS) sector organisations delivered to 16-17 year olds by contributing its skills, networks and experience around the local labour market. IES, working in partnership with National Centre for Social Research (lead contractor) was commissioned to undertake an evaluation of the new service. Specifically, IES led a theory of change evaluation involving an exercise to elicit the theories behind the design of the pilot that should assure its success, followed by case study research to test whether the policy worked as intended by policymakers. IES researchers also led an impact assessment and cost-benefit analysis drawing on techniques first used for the IES evaluation of the Youth Contract for 16-17 year olds.

IES carried out an impact assessment and cost benefit analysis of ReAct II (the Redundancy Action Scheme) in Wales as part of the final evaluation of the programme by BMG Research for the Welsh Government. ReAct provides people who have been made redundant with grants to invest in training, as well as offering subsidies to employers for hiring and training redundant workers. IES compared outcomes of ReAct participants with a counterfactual group of non-participants to work out whether the project was having an effect. The project also examined the financial viability of the intervention, estimating its costs and benefits.

The aim of this project for Cedefop was to: develop conceptual and methodological frameworks for both defining and measuring the magnitude of low-skilled population in the EU; describe and analyse the characteristics, causes and trends regarding the low-skilled across the EU; build robust scenarios about future supply and demand for low-skilled workers; and develop and apply a rigorous methodological framework in order to define individual and social costs of low-skilled adults in the EU. This research is referred to in the European Commission’s New Skills Agenda for Europe, which was launched on 10 June 2016.

The Apprenticeship Trailblazers were introduced as a means to address recommendations from the Richard Review (2012), that employers should take greater ownership of training and assessment. In early 2014, IES was commissioned carry out a qualitative evaluation of the Phase 1 Trailblazers, involving interviews and board conversation analysis, supplemented by an employer survey. The research was conducted over three phases in order to capture change over time. Consultations involved national stakeholders, lead/contributing employers, employers who had not engaged, and industry and training bodies. Following the submission of the first interim report from the research, a second tranche of employer networks (20 in total) were engaged to develop more of the new Apprenticeship Standards. In light of this, IES’s evaluation was extended to include eight of these and to track them over two rounds of research, using the same approach. A policy-relevant, final report combining the two Trailblazer phases will be produced in Spring 2015.

IES was commissioned by BIS to undertake a study on young people’s transitions to, and within, the labour market. This project aimed to produce an up-to-date evidence-base on movements and progression within the youth labour and learning sectors, to provide comparisons with earlier cohorts and to have an improved evidence base on the long-term outcomes on employment in adolescent and adult years.

IES was commissioned to carry out an evaluation of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) Healthy Workplaces Campaign 2012-2013. The evaluation aimed to assess the effectiveness and impact of the campaign and its activities at EU and national level. It provided conclusions and recommendations to help develop and further increases the effectiveness and impact of future campaigns.

In 2011, the UK government launched the Work Programme, a major new active labour market initiative replacing a multitude of previous welfare-to-work initiatives. It goes further than any previous such programmes in contracting out the delivery of support for workless jobseekers to a variety of private and not-for-profit providers, under an innovative payment-by-results funding regime, which adopts a ‘black box’ approach, under which the government no longer prescribes the nature of the support to be provided. IES carried out a multi-stranded evaluation of the Work Programme, including an evaluation of the approach to commissioning the Programme (through prime providers and sub-contractors) and an evaluation of the programme itself, through quantitative and qualitative research methods. The research was conducted by a consortium led by IES and completed in 2015.

IES conducted research to identify the ways in which organisations in the care sector are using new technology to support and improve quality of life for people with dementia. The work involved interviews with experts and practitioners, a search of relevant literature and websites, and a call for good practice from practitioners. The work was undertaken for the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) and was to be used in the development of a guide to good practice that they are writing for SCIE.