IER News & blogs

A paper jointly presented by Professors Alan Brown and Jenny Bimrose at the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU), 15 – 17 March, Madeira, provided an overarching view of how to use on-line collaborative learning to facilitate learning development and professional identity transformation of careers and employment practitioners. It built upon work from a European research project, EmployID.

Dr David Owen met Professor Sawako Yufu from Waseda University in Tokyo to discuss IER work on the DfE Teacher Workload Survey and research into teacher earnings for the NASUWT on March 22nd.

Prof Yufu is a quantitative researcher who studies teachers' working conditions and educational reform in Japan. She runs a regular survey of teacher workload in Japan. Her particular interests are in the effect which the school environment and neighbourhood have on workload and trends in workload over time.

IER’s Director, Chris Warhurst, has been invited to speak at the OECD’s annual Local Economic and Employment Development (LEED) meeting. The session will focus on putting skills utilisation into practice. The meeting takes place at the OECD in Paris over 17-18 May.

The UK unemployment rate for 16-64 year olds increased very slightly over the last 3 months (November to February compared with August to October 2017), but this was composed of a small fall for men and a slightly larger increase for women. For the West Midlands, the unemployment rate fell very slightly for both men and women over this period, but the fall was larger for men than for women.

In the UK as a whole, the percentage of both men and women in the labour force and the percentage of men and women in work increased slightly. However, in the West Midlands, the percentage in work did not change, but the percentage of men in the workforce fell, slightly more than the fall for women. This suggests that the more favourable trend for the West Midlands may be the result of formerly unemployed people (mainly men) no longer looking for work.

At the local scale, unemployment has been increasing sharply (568 more JSA claims in February 2017 than December 2017 - an increase of 20.6%, but only 25 more than 1 February 2017) in Coventry during 2018 (for both men and women), but has fallen in Birmingham (by 783 or 3.6% and by 2.6 thousand or 11.3% 2017-18). However, the unemployment rate for Coventry is 2 per cent, less than half that for Birmingham (4.1 per cent).

Dr Dari Luchinskaya comments on the Office for Budget and Responsibility (OBR) forecasts and the picture that they paint for the economy in the coming years, as well as on the main Spring Statement headlines and any implications for Wales. Read her blog here.