Publications

This publication was authored by Wendy Hirsh independently of IES.

Activity Agreements were designed for young people aged between 16 and 17 not in employment education and training (NEET) for at least 20 consecutive weeks. By signing an agreement the young person agrees to take part in a series of activities (designed to help them move towards an employment, education or training outcome) in exchange for an allowance. The agreements were piloted in eight areas between April 2006 and March 2008.

This paper outlines some of the key arguments which suggest that Britain and the rest of Europe – or at least, continental western Europe – represent incompatible varieties of capitalism, and explores this further by considering some of the meanings of that elusive concept, the ‘European social model’. The paper looks at the complex interconnection between economic integration and social (or labour market) regulation within the EU.

This literature and programme review was commissioned by the Improving Health, Increasing Employment Project Board of Birmingham and Solihull (IHIE) to help plan future programmes for existing Incapacity Benefit claimants.

This publication was authored by Catherine Rickard (née Chubb) before she joined IES.

The guidance provides recommendations for good practice that are based on the best available evidence of effectiveness and cost effectiveness. This report aims to assess the cost-effectiveness of a range of interventions to return people to work following long term sickness absence. It accompanies the report of the evidence review of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of these interventions.

This is an exploration of how Learning and Development (L&D) in organisations might develop over the next five to ten years, particularly focusing on the implications for L&D professionals. The report finds that learning is moving towards a more continuous and social process, where informality replaces the more structured interventions of the past.

This working paper sets out to: examine the broader role, contribution and limitations of comparative international skills benchmarking studies; identify those elements of the influential Competence and Competition study that represented a lasting contribution to British debates about education and training (E&T); and identify where new approaches to old problems may be emerging elsewhere in the developed world.

Since the seminal Birch job creation study (1979), policy-makers across the world have been keen to promote entrepreneurship as a mechanism for creating new employment opportunities. In parallel with this political desire, researchers have sought to isolate what types of people become entrepreneurs and what types of entrepreneurs create the most jobs. At the basic level, we observe that men constitute the majority of the total entrepreneurial stock. But our research finds that (a) much of the observed differential is easily accounted for by differences in sector and occupational characteristics of men and women, and (b) the true gender difference is diminishing rapidly over time.

IES Annual Review 2008