IER Newsletter February 2024

IER Newsletter - February 2024

Spelling it out, making it count

‘Spelling It Out, Making It Count’ investigates the current state of Functional Skills Qualifications (FSQs) in English and maths in the UK following their reform in 2019. Conducted by the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) and The University of Warwick Institute of Employment Research (IER) - including IER's Peter Dickinson, and supported by the Gatsby Foundation and the Edge Foundation, the study explores whether FSQs are still serving their intended purpose as practical, real-world alternatives to GCSEs that focus on developing essential life and work skills.

Through interviews, focus groups, and detailed analysis of FSQ content, performance, and costs, the research uncovered several issues:
- Pass rates for FSQs have fallen significantly in recent years, despite the difficulty of exams remaining largely unchanged. This appears linked to reduced contextualization of exam questions.
- Funding rates for FSQs have remained static since 2014 and are now insufficient to cover delivery costs, forcing providers to operate at a loss. For FSQs taken within apprenticeships, the financial burden can be as high as £440 per qualification.
- The mandatory requirement for apprentices to pass Level 2 FSQs, despite failure to do so not necessarily reflecting deficiencies in applied skills, continues to hinder apprenticeship completion rates and will hamper government efforts to raise achievement rates from 52% to 67%

Kobayashi, C., Warner, P. and Dickinson (2024). Spelling It Out, Making It Count: Functional Skills qualifications and their place in vocational training. AELP. January 2024.

Essential capabilities for managing an aged care workforce

Effective management and leadership in social care are essential for effective care worker performance, which, in turn, enables high-quality care. This research report, commissioned by the Australian Association of Gerontology and written by IER's Professor Philip Taylor, highlights the critical need to understand better the nature and challenges of care management and leadership against a backdrop of growing demand for care and predicted shortfalls in the supply of workers to the sector.Taylor, P. (2023). Evidence review: Essential capabilities for managing an aged care workforce. Australian Association of Gerontology (AAG).

European social dialogues: Shaping EU social policy through parental leave rights

IER's Professor Trine Larsen has recently published a paper with co-authors which analyses the European Social Dialogue (ESD). The ESD has served as the platform for European social partners to negotiate parental leave policies at the EU level since 1995.

The partners’ efforts to revise the regulations in 2015, in response to the European Commission’s broader approach toward European work–life balance policies, failed, however, and the reasons for and implications of this failure remain insufficiently explored. Drawing on existing ESD literature and leveraging the regulator-intermediary-target (RIT) model, the authors develop a typology of policymaking outcomes based on the analysis of three parental leave directives from 1996 to 2019.

The findings demonstrate that divergent preferences among European social partners, particularly when juxtaposed against the Commission’s policy objectives and interests, reduced the probability of a successful ESD through which European social partners could generate a framework agreement. Instead of being rule-makers, these conditions relegated European social partners to the role of rule-takers. If this trend continues, it poses a significant challenge to the role and influence of European social partners in EU policymaking.

Im, Z. J., Larsen, T. P., & Pircher, B. (2024). European Social Dialogues: Shaping EU Social Policy through Parental Leave Rights. ILR Review, 0(0).

LMI for All webinar series - Skills mismatches

As part of part of LMI for All's mission to provide the latest information about the state of skills demand and supply, a webinar was held to provide insights into the current state of skill mismatches. Hosted by IER and moderated by Terence Hogarth, the online event took place on Wednesday 28 Feb, 2024.

It consisted of three expert presentations with opportunities for questions. Seamus McGuinness from the Economic and Social Research Institute kicked off the event summarising the variety of concepts which lie behind the of measures of skills mismatch currently in use (e.g. skill shortages, over-skilling, under-education, etc.). Mark Winterbotham, who for several decades managed the Employers Skill Survey in England, then revealed the extent of skill mismatches reported by employers. Finally, Kostantinos Pouliakas from Cedefop presented findings from the latest European Skills and Jobs Survey (ESJS) which provides detailed information on the extent to which employees skills are matched to their current job.

Bad Jobs in Europe

IER’s Dr Sangwoo Lee presented one of his recent research papers at the London School of Economics CEP Well-being Seminar on 22 Feb 2024. This paper, co-authored with Prof Francis Green at UCL, introduces a new well-being related threshold for bad jobs.

The conceptualisation of bad jobs often entails low job quality, typically associated with job insecurity or low pay. These conceptualisations often adopt a simplistic framework, focusing on a single dimension of job quality, thereby leading to a potential misclassification of bad jobs. In the paper, accordingly, a new method is proposed for defining the threshold of a ‘bad job’, based on a discontinuity in the relationship between a composite index of job quality and wellbeing. Applied to the European Working Conditions Survey data, the evidence suggests that a cut-off threshold for ‘bad jobs’ is at the 10th percentile. Comparing workers in jobs below this threshold with those at the next decile, there is a distinctly large gap in psychological wellbeing, and in several other measures of wellbeing. Using this threshold gives a ‘bad jobs’/’other jobs’ dichotomy that discriminates on well-being far better than definitions based only on low earnings and job insecurity. Using this new well-being threshold for bad jobs, the paper reveals that bad jobs are more common in poorer countries and in countries with weaker labour regulations, e.g., work councils and national minimum wage. Two findings differentiate the distributional pattern of bad jobs from that of low-earnings jobs: first, the prevalence of bad jobs is greater in large establishments; second, there is no gender gap in the prevalence of bad jobs.

The recording of the seminar is available here.

Winners and losers in apprenticeships

In a recent blog, IER's Peter Dickinson provided an overview of the winners and losers in apprenticeships since the 2017 reforms.

Since 2017, apprenticeship provision has changed dramatically for both apprentices and apprentice employers. The publication of the latest apprenticeship data enables an analysis of a further complete 12 months of the apprenticeship programme, the lasting effects of the 2017 apprenticeship reforms (of which the levy has been the most impactful) as well as the more recent pandemic.

Read the full blog here.

Europe needs a management policy not just more skills policies

In a recent blog, Professor Chris Warhurst, argues that If the European Commission wants to improve company performance, it needs to improve management, not just skills.

2023 was The European Year of Skills. Its purpose was to address skills shortages and promote reskilling and upskilling. It is also intended that workers acquire the right skills to access quality jobs. Such aims are laudable and extend the strong and continuous emphasis on the importance of skills by the European Commission. However, policy on management is also needed.

Read the full blog here.

Call for abstracts: 42nd conference of IWPLMS

The 42^nd conference of the International Working Party on Labour Market Segmentation (IWPLMS) aims to explore the challenges and opportunities arising from transformations in the world of work with a specific focus on the multifaceted dimensions of labour market segmentation.

The conference welcomes contributions that investigate how labour market policies and practices as well as firm level and social partner practices and initiatives contribute to a fair and just distribution of work and life chances across regions and generations, while also considering environmental awareness.

The conference will take place at Copenhagen Business School on September 5-6, 2024, with IER’s Professor Trine Larsen being one of the local organisers. The deadline for submission of abstracts is March 15, 2024.

For more information please visit the conference website.

Other new publications

Apreda, R., Liga Baltina, L., Hogarth, T., and Ravanos, P. (2024). The future of skills in the ETF partner countries. Cross-country reflection paper: a multifaceted innovative approach combining Big Data and empirical research methods. European Training Foundation, January 2024.

Green, F., Lee, S., Zou, M., and Zhou,Y. (2024). Work and life: the relative importance of job quality for general well-being, and implications for social surveys, Socio-Economic Review, 2024

Yang, J., Warhurst, C., and Li, Y. (2023). The approach to and challenges in measuring innovation in China. European Journal of Workplace Innovation, 8(1), 85-104.

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