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The digital experience insights surveys allow organisations to collect valid, representative and actionable data from their students and staff about the digital environment they offer and to understand how digital technologies are used in learning and teaching as well as across the organisation. The survey findings are a way of informing and driving change, providing data that contributes to digital strategy and helps to secure return on investment. The anonymised data collected in the surveys allows us to gain a national picture of student and staff digital experiences and to monitor this over time, showing progress and highlighting issues of national concern. This year 4,560 professional services staff from UK further and higher education took part in our digital experience insights survey specifically for professional services staff. The survey was conducted between October 2019 and June 2020. In total 32 organisations took part, 24 of these were based in England, 3 in Wales, 3 in Scotland and 2 in Northern Ireland.

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been a unique factor this year. Sixty-seven per cent of professional services staff who completed the survey did so before the lockdown on 23 March 2020 and the move to off campus learning and working; 33 per cent completed it on or after this date. This has allowed us to partition the data and provide an initial comparison, providing a brief summary where the differences were found to be statistically significant. It is important to remember that while the impact of COVID-19 may have influenced some responses in terms of perceptions and attitudes, opinions generally take longer to form so it would be methodologically unsound to assume that responses relate specifically to before or after 23 March. Instead, we have drawn on the wealth of additional research on the impact of COVID-19 on colleges and universities alongside the survey findings to look forward and consider how we can use this combined knowledge to better understand the role and potential of technology in further and higher education to make positive improvements to the digital experience of all students and staff.

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Environmental conservation is an important industry in Northern Ireland. This report presents information on current and future skills needs, as well as the demand for skills and professional development. It identifies the new skills that will be required to ensure the sustainability of the industry, the companies within the industry, and the jobs of those employed. The Environmental Conservation industry embraces the management of landscapes, habitats and species (in urban, rural, coastal and marine environments) alongside countryside and coastal access, recreation and interpretation to promote awareness, understanding and enjoyment of our rural and urban environment. This report is divided into six further sections: section two looks at the profile of the businesses engaged in this work; section three looks at the issues of recruitment and retention; section four considers skills and training issues; section five looks at the key challenges facing the sector; section six draws the results together; and section seven provides recommendations.

A summary of the findings from the research are: (1) males who primarily work full-time dominate the businesses who responded to this survey. Most work in the private sector and a large majority are self-employed; (2) recruitment activity over the last 12 months has been fairly low; (3) about three quarters of businesses have not lost any members of staff or gained any new ones in the last 12 months; (4) looking forward, most businesses believe their employment levels will remain largely unchanged over the next 12 months (63 per cent); (5) when asked what skills their staff lacked, a third of businesses (33 per cent) cited technical and practical skills were lacking; (6) a further analysis was carried out which separated the skills into three distinct categories: technical/practical skills, environmental conservation specific skills, and general business skills. When aggregated, environmental skills accounted for 68 per cent of all identified skills shortages; (7) businesses are most likely to use private training providers and least likely to use a college to meet their training needs; (8) encouragingly, all businesses agreed that the training they had undertaken had been of benefit to their organisation; and (9) looking forward, businesses are most concerned about the economic conditions facing them and the fear of a recession. Businesses were also worried about increasing competition and cash flow issues. They were least concerned about the higher-level issue of climate change and were unconcerned about retaining staff.

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An examination of gender, social class and ethnicity performance and participation patterns in different UK countries shows that inequities occur in relation to gender, class and ethnicity but that the patterns of inequity look quite different in the three domains. Achievement is equal for different genders but many more males take mathematics forward to advanced levels; social class differences persist in both achievement and participation; and ethnicity shows a varied pattern with some groups performing and participating at particularly high levels and some particularly low. This paper identifies some critical issues that we face in making mathematics and science equitable and begins to analyse some of the barriers that stand in the way of students who are female, and from some ethnic and social groups.

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This report was commissioned by the Welsh Assembly Government as part of a wider review it is conducting of careers services in Wales. The aim of the report is to review the work of Careers Wales, including its links to other career guidance providers, in an international context. Use has been made of the benchmarks provided by the OECD Career Guidance Policy Review. Particular comparisons are drawn with the other main all-age services, in New Zealand, Northern Ireland and Scotland. The report is based on an examination of over 200 documents and on six days of meetings and visits carried out in November 2008. These included meetings with relevant staff of the Welsh Assembly Government, with the chief executives of the Careers Wales companies, with a number of the Careers Wales companies' staff, and with a wide variety of partners and stakeholders. On the basis of this review, the strengths of, and challenges facing, Careers Wales are discussed. The review concludes that there is a strong case for restructuring the organisational framework of Careers Wales but that it is a strong and highly professional organisation, and, if these changes are undertaken successfully, has the capability to become a fully world-class service.

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The initiation of this inquiry came from the Committee for Employment and Learning's concerns regarding the structure and effectiveness of careers education, information, advice and guidance (CEIAG) in Northern Ireland. These concerns were triggered by briefings from a number of organisations which highlighted issues with how CEIAG is taught in schools and colleges. The committee also had concerns regarding the perceived lack of a co-ordinated approach to careers and its place in the wider economic development of Northern Ireland and questioned how it can be that, simultaneously, there can exist, both a large number of young people leaving education with little prospect of employment alongside claims from industry that Northern Ireland is facing a skills shortage which is jeopardising future growth. The report outlines the various policies, strategies, structures and delivery mechanisms for careers provision. CEIAG in Northern Ireland is a joint function of the Department for Employment and Learning and the Department of Education. The Department for Employment and Learning, through partnership agreements between its Careers Service and post primary schools, supports the schools' careers education programmes by providing impartial careers information, advice and guidance while the Department of Education takes the lead in relation to the delivery of CEIAG in schools. In relation to further education the colleges have individual responsibility for the allocation of resources and the integration of CEIAG in the curriculum. The universities in Northern Ireland are individually responsible for the delivery of CEIAG.

The committee found much to praise about CEIAG in Northern Ireland but the evidence it considered provided a range of views which can be categorised into a number of main themes: (1) a range of criticisms of careers delivery; (2) ideas and recommendations for how to make the system better; (3) a number of organisations have signposted the inquiry to models of good practice; and (4) finance and resource issues. Each of these areas is dealt with in turn in the report. Throughout the report a range of recommendations are made relating to this evidence. Recommendations are summarised under the following areas: a statutory duty: developing a consistent approach; the role of the curriculum and examples of good practice; overcoming barriers; promoting [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] STEM subjects; providing information; engaging with business; and improving advice.

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This report presents the findings of the UK Commission’s Employer Perspectives Survey 2012 (UKCEPS 2012), the second in a series of biennial, large scale surveys of employers designed to provide a UK-wide picture of employer perspectives of, and experiences in, the recruitment and skills landscape. The UKCEPS 2012 was conducted between May and August 2012 against a backdrop of longstanding economic uncertainty. At the time of the 2012 survey the UK was officially back in recession as the economy struggled to return to sustained growth with the on-going problems in the Eurozone continuing to affect market confidence and adding to the economic uncertainty being experienced by employers. The first Employer Perspectives Survey was carried out in 2010 shortly after the election of the Coalition Government and the official emergence from the 2008-09 recession although again with a backdrop of economic uncertainly, for example with reductions in government spending widely anticipated. The UKCEPS series provides valuable evidence on the interface between employers and the recruitment and skills systems, and on how they go about meeting their skills needs. The survey presents evidence of a continuing lack of alignment between the private and public skills and recruitment markets, raising questions concerning the efficiency of public and private investment in people development. That employers invest significantly in training provides a challenge to training providers to ensure the delivery and organisation of training yields the greatest value. The report provides the first analysis of the survey data and there is more that can be explored to inform policy and practice across a range of employment and skills areas.

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This collection of practitioner research papers brings together the experiences and reflections of nine Essential Skills tutors in Northern Ireland. All of these tutors undertook their research as students on the Essential Skills Tutor Qualifications Programme at Queen's University Belfast. Practitioner research is included in this programme because it offers opportunities for local practitioners to participate in the development of knowledge and good practice in the field of Essential Skills in Northern Ireland. One of the key themes has been that of motivation and engagement in learning, and the papers included in this collection were chosen because they represented the range of approaches which practitioner researchers have adopted to exploring this theme.

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The papers are as follows: Exploring text messaging from the perspective of the young people who use it / Pamela McDowell; The theories of motivation and their relevance to Essential Skills learners within further education: a case study / Kim McAnespie; The power of praise: examining the impact of praise in the adult learning context / Suzanne Martin; Literacy and the Jobskills learner: the perceived impact of literacy skills on aspirations and ambitions / Noel McStay; An investigation into the role of talk and learning in developing learner writing skills: implications for curriculum design / Amanda McCausland; Tutor responses to learners' errors when reading aloud / Louise Kelly; Exploring peer learning as an effective tool for teaching and motivating literacy students in the context of Essential Skills in further and higher education (16 to 19 year olds) / Louise O'Sullivan; A case study of the benefits of using horticulture as a medium for delivering Essential Skills to young people with learning disabilities / George Moffett; The impact of literacy classes: a case study / Margaret Rankin. Show less

This report examines the relationships between the proportion of graduates in the employed labour force and the levels of wages and productivity. The importance of this relationship is that good evidence exists for a strong relationship across UK regions and local areas. This relationship can be summarised as: (1) a high percentage of the employed labour force with graduate qualifications is associated with high wages and productivity; and (2) this relationship only exists for graduates working in the private sector, there is no relationship in the public sector. Show less

This statistical bulletin has been produced by the Department for Employment and Learning, Northern Ireland (NI), using data collected by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). It provides details of higher education (HE) qualifications gained by NI domiciled students at UK higher education institutions (HEIs) and details of all students gaining HE qualifications at NI HEIs in the academic year 2008/09.

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This collection of essays examines some of the issues arising from the NIACE Adult Learners’ Survey 2002. Drawing on the responses of 5000 adults aged 17 and over, the survey identifies key indicators of participation in learning in the UK. The survey data is reported in ‘Adult learning and social division: a persistent pattern: volume 1’ (indexed at TD/TNC 74.137). The essays are: Research agendas: present and future / Naomi Sargant; Participating in adult learning: comparing the sources and applying the results / Steve Leman; The benefits of learning / Tom Schuller; Social capital and lifelong learning: survey findings on the relationship between sociability and participation / John Field; Lifelong learning trajectories in Wales: results of the NIACE Adult Learners’ Survey 2002 / Stephen Gorard; Changing and persisting patterns: the public and lifelong learning in Scotland / Maria Slowey; Learning in adult life in Northern Ireland: the turning of the tide? / John Field; Match or mismatch: do the findings reflect the qualitative evidence? / Veronica McGivney. Show less