IER News & blogs

Futuretrack, is an ambitious and ground-breaking study of the process of higher education in the United Kingdom. Its ambition was to track applicants for a full-time place in higher education in 2006 as they made their way through the undergraduate stages of higher education and onwards, or the alternative pathways they chose. It was ground-breaking in that it was the first longitudinal survey ever undertaken exclusively via a web-based approach and for which statistical controls could be applied. The Stage 4 report presents the survey of respondents who had completed three or four year undergraduate courses 18 or 30 months previously.

Watch online for free – Wednesday 7th November 2012 (10.15am-4.30pm)

Futuretrack is an academic research study funded by HECSU and undertaken by IER. Futuretrack has been tracking how students develop over a six year period; it surveyed 130,000 students at the time of UCAS application in 2006, twice during their period at university and finally two years after graduating. It is the most comprehensive research of the relationship between higher education and the graduate labour market ever undertaken with unprecedented levels of data.

They applied to university in 2006, and after three years of full-time study the majority graduated into one of the worst recessions in history. So, what influenced their career journey and where are they now?

HECSU will be exclusively broadcasting the findings of the Futuretrack studies at their conference on 7th November and invite you and your colleagues to watch the presentations (not the round table discussion groups, sorry) online and submit your questions to the panel via Twitter. IER Professors Kate Purcell and Peter Elias will be making presentations in a session on "From application to graduation and beyond".
 
Register your interest now by emailing v.miles@prospects.ac.uk. The conference is free to view online and you can follow us at www.twitter.com/futuretrack2006

The UK labour market has become more challenging for all jobseekers, with unemployment particularly high among young people and those with limited education and skills. Research published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation describes the difficulty of job searching for young people seeking low-skilled work, examining three contrasting local labour market areas in England and Wales.

The report was co-authored by Professor Becky Tunstall (University of York) and Professor Anne Green (IER), Ruth Lupton, Simon Watmough and Katie Bates (LSE).

Over the past 22 months, the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick has been leading on six ESRC seminars examining the turbulent policy context in which careers in the UK is being delivered and the implications for the practice and professionalism of careers services. These have now been delivered, leaving a final seminar, which is scheduled for 30th October in London. The focus of the final seminar will be ‘looking back and looking forward’ at careers guidance in the UK context. If you are interested in attending, please email sally-anne.barnes@warwick.ac.uk to reserve a place. Information of the seminars that have already been delivered can be found on the ESRC seminar project page.

The first round of auto-enrolment into a workplace pension starts today. First proposed by the 2005 Turner Commission report, auto enrolment is intended to help the half of employees who have no supplementary pension to save more for retirement. The rollout has attracted considerable media attention, much of it concentrating upon whether small savers will really benefit and how far the government is prepared to go with its proposal to develop a basic pension that is sufficiently high that such small savings are not means-tested away. IER’s Bernard Casey has recently published a paper on this subject - Voluntary Pension Saving for Old Age: Are the Objectives of Self-responsibility and Security Compatible?. The paper drew comparisons with Germany where policymakers are facing similar challenges (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9515.2012.00853.x/abstract - full content only available to subscribers).