IER News & blogs

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Anne Fessi as the Communications & Engagement Manager for ReWAGE, the Renewing Work Advisory Group of Experts, launched in July and funded by the ESRC.

Anne has over 20 years' experience of delivering strategic and tactical communications and stakeholder engagement. She has worked for the UK Government’s Department for Education, Ministry of Defence, NHS and the Skills Funding Agency. She joins IER from Ofqual and will be with ReWAGE until the end of 2022.

A frequent claim from labour market information users (e.g., educational and training providers) is the lack of disaggregated data to identify the current requirements of the labour demand. This project, conducted by Dr Jeisson Cardenas-Rubio, pilots and assesses whether information from job portals can be classified according to the relatively new 6- digit UK Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) developed by the ONS. It thus opens new research avenues in assessing the possibility of organising and coding vacancy data and understanding the dynamics of the labour market at a more disaggregated level.

A rapid evidence review by Gaby Atfield, Beate Baldauf and Erika Kispeter examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education, childcare and social work and related social care workforce. The review also examines how negative effects can be mitigated. The Department for Education funded this work following a recommendation from SAGE.

The University of Warwick is inviting applications for the following posts at the IER:

· Professor or Associate Professor and

· Research Fellow.

Full details can be found at the University of Warwick website: for the Professorial post here and the Research Fellow post here. Closing date is 20 October 2021 for both posts.

We look forward to welcoming successful applicants to join our highly skilled and experienced staff.

A new report from IER provides an explanation for the decline in the number of apprenticeships starts following the introduction of the Apprenticeship Levy in 2017. The research, funded by the Edge Foundation and Gatsby Foundation, was based on reviewing statistical evidence, and conducting interviews with a range of employers to find out how their apprenticeship recruitment had changed following the Levy’s introduction.

The report’s authors – Peter Dickinson and Terence Hogarth – explain the fall in the number of apprenticeship starts with reference to an increasing preference for employers to place people on relatively high level and more costly apprenticeships, and a fall in the number of apprentices being taken on in smaller, non-Levy paying enterprises. There are some transitional effects as well which are likely to be smoothed out with the passage of time.

The executive summary of the report is available along with the short report and the long report. Read Peter Dickinson's article in the HR Director here.