IER News & blogs
Clare Lyonette presents her research at the Community, Work and Family conference in Valletta, Malta
Clare Lyonette attended this year's Community, Work and Family conference, held in Malta from May 22nd-25th 2019. Clare presented two papers:
(i) one focusing on the Forces 
in Mind Trust-funded project on self-employment among the Armed Forces Community: 'The transition to self-employment among military veterans – identifying class differences in success and failure’, and
(ii) the other with Professor Tracey Warren from the University of Nottingham on their joint body of research on part-time employment: 'Poles apart? The impact of occupational class and hours of work on part-time job quality for women’.
IER literature reviews, commissioned as part of the Review of Post-18 Education and Funding, published
The Department for Education published three IER literature reviews commissioned as part of the Augar Review:
• Dickinson, P. (2019) Choices students make between different post-18 education routes. London: Department for Education. Read the short summary in the press release here.
The Review of Post-18 Education and Funding, launched by the Prime Minister in February last year, was led by Philip Augar, and reported its findings on 30 May.
Daria Luchinskaya appointed as co-convenor of SRHE Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning network
Dr Daria Luchinskaya has been appointed as a co-convenor of the Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning network for the SRHE (Society for Research into Higher Education).
Together with convenors Dr Heike Behle and Dr Ciaran Burke, Daria will be organising SRHE network events and other network activities - look out for the Network's forthcoming events on the SRHE website.
IER organised Director of Skills workshop
A meeting of Directors of Skills took place on 14 May 2019; it was organised by the IER, and hosted by West Midlands Combined Authority.
It brought together Directors of Skills from seven of the nine current Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCAs) to share and discuss their experiences of skills devolution and the development of their Local Industrial Strategies.
The workshop, chaired by Olly Newton of the Edge Foundation, also heard presentations on skills ecosystems and apprenticeships by Ewart Keep (Director of SKOPE, Oxford University) and Peter Dickinson (Senior Research Fellow, IER).
A follow-up Director of Skills workshop is planned for Autumn 2019.
IER team visited India for project launch workshop in spring 2019
In late April/early May Clare Lyonette, Gaby Atfield and Sudipa Sarkar visited India for the first of a series of workshops as part of the ESRC Global Challenges Research Fund project 'Inequalities and skills acquisition in young people: Identification of factors affecting successful outcomes in the DDU-GKY Indian skills programme for unemployed young people’.
The IER team was joined by Bhaskar Chakravorty, an IER PhD student and research assistant, and Himadri Sinha, co-investigator on the project, based at Xavier Institute of Social Service (XISS). During the first workshop visit, the IER team delivered workshops to Master's students at XISS on quantitative and qualitative research methods, as well as engaged with key local stakeholders.