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The decision to invest in workplace training, though complex, ultimately relates to the expected return on investment. Part of the challenge for employers and policymakers is that there are few high quality studies that have reliably measured the effects of literacy training or adequately measured its return on investment for employers, employees, and government. In an effort to fill this knowledge gap, the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills sponsored a large-scale, multiyear research project called UPSKILL to evaluate workplace essential skills training. The project resulted in important new evidence that helps establish the business case for workplace essential skills training.

A total of 88 firms in the accommodations and food services sector, primarily hotels, were randomly assigned to a program group where employees were offered a maximum of 40 hours of literacy and essential skills training on-site during working hours, or to a control group whose employees did not receive the training. As a result of the training delivered through the UPSKILL program, firms experienced gains in revenue, cost savings from increased productivity, and reductions in hiring costs that amounted to about $4,600 per participant. When firms are assumed to bear the full costs of training and release time for workers, their net benefit is $577 per participant, for an average return on investment of 23 per cent. Employees also experienced a substantial positive return on investment from UPSKILL training, as they bear few costs under the workplace delivery model. Earnings gains from increased job retention were significantly larger than the modest investment of personal time that participants devoted to complement the on-site training outside of working hours.

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This document is the third deliverable for the UPSKILL Health and Mental Health Outcomes Study (UPSKILL Health), whose purpose is to explore the relationship of literacy and essential skills (LES) with health and mental health, using data from the original UPSKILL trial. The UPSKILL trial was a large demonstration project that tested the effectiveness of workplace-based literacy and essential skills training for employees in the tourism accommodations sector. The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) contracted with Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) in January 2014 to undertake a two-phased sub-study that analyzes the health implications of the UPSKILL trial. Since the UPSKILL trial results were somewhat ambiguous with respect to health impacts (i.e., a negative impact on bodily pain; mixed results for mental health), the first phase involved a more in-depth and comprehensive analysis of health-related data already collected through UPSKILL; the results of these analyses are presented here. The second phase - currently underway - is a qualitative inquiry involving key informant interviews and focus groups with a sample of UPSKILL participants.

This report pertains to the first phase of this project - the in-depth exploration of quantitative, health-related data on worker and workplace characteristics, psycho-social variables and health-related practices (e.g., health literacy), job performance, and business outcomes. The report presents background information about the UPSKILL trial and UPSKILL Health projects, and the basis for considering the potential health impacts of literacy and essential skills (LES) training. Results from each of four lines of inquiry - corresponding to the four research questions - are provided, and implications for the remaining work on the project are discussed.

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The UPSKILL Health and Mental Health Outcomes study (UPSKILL Health) is a sub-study of the original UPSKILL project, which the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) designed and implemented with support from the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills (OLES) at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC, formerly HRSDC). UPSKILL's purpose was to evaluate workplace Literacy and Essential Skills (LES) training using the most rigorous evaluation methods. This large-scale randomized control trial began in February 2010 and ran until February 2014. The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) recently contracted with SRDC to undertake a two-phased sub-study to build on the existing UPSKILL demonstration project. The first phase involves an analysis of health-related data already collected through UPSKILL. The second phase is a qualitative inquiry involving key informant interviews and focus groups with a sample of UPSKILL participants. This report describes the development and empirical testing of a conceptual model of the relationships between literacy and essential skills and health in the workplace. The first section presents a review of the relevant literature in literacy, health, and employment, while the second section presents the project's overall methodology and the proposed conceptual model. The third section provides results from the analyses that have been conducted to date on UPSKILL baseline data sets.

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The Future to Discover project commenced in 2003 and was implemented by the Social Research Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) as a social experiment. It followed the realization that to increase postsecondary education (PSE) access among underrepresented groups, attention needed to focus on the reduction of multiple barriers. Lack of financial resources, poor academic preparation, poor information and lack of interest in further education can all hold a student back, with many facing two or three of these barriers at the same time. With a scientifically rigorous design, the project was established to test interventions intended to overcome limitations posed by lack of financial resources or lack of information about the available pathways through PSE and their costs and benefits. More than 5400 student volunteers in two provinces were randomly assigned to one of four groups and received either one of two carefully designed interventions, both at the same time or no new service as part of a control group. With such a rigorous design, over time it has become possible to report whether or not such interventions make a genuine difference in young people's lives and whether it would be financially viable for governments to adopt such programs at scale.

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In this report, we used the data from the 1998 Adult Education and Training Survey (AETS) to estimate the impact of participating in adult education and training on the employment and earnings of Canadians. We applied methods that assume 'selection on observables', including both standard regression-based methods and propensity score matching methods. We also applied methods based on instruments or exclusion restrictions, including standard instrumental variables estimation and the well-known Heckman bivariate normal selection estimator. These methods aim to deal with 'selection on unobservables'. We find that none of the methods we examined produced plausible estimates of the impact of adult education and training, although the methods that assume selection on observables produced more reasonable estimates than those that assume an instrument or exclusion restriction. Based on the results of our analysis, we suggest improvements to the AETS that would make it a better tool for estimating the labour market impacts of adult education and training.

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Life After High School is a research project supported by Canada Student Loans to develop, implement and test a new intervention to lower non-financial barriers on access to post-secondary education. The objective of the intervention is to increase the proportion of students who access post-secondary education and student financial aid. The overall goal of the project is to determine to what extent the intervention achieves this objective among graduating students from high schools with low post-secondary enrolment rates. The project involved the following three major design components: (1) develop an intervention that provides labour market information about the economic benefits of post-secondary education - increased earnings and employment; (2) implement the intervention in British Columbia (BC) among students who could enrol in post-secondary education within 12 months; and (3) evaluate how effective the intervention is at nudging Grade 12 students. The main purpose of the final report is to present the impacts of offering Life After High School to selected high schools with low post-secondary transition rates in BC, using administrative data files on secondary, post-secondary, and financial aid information. In order that the results can be placed in context, the report also presents a detailed description of the Life After High School Project (section one) and its implementation (section two). Section three presents the impact results. The report then concludes with lessons learned (section four) during the implementation and analysis of the intervention.

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Future to Discover (FTD) is a pilot project testing the effectiveness of two interventions designed to help students overcome certain barriers to post-secondary education, namely lack of career clarity, misinformation about post-secondary education, and lack of financial resources. This report presents post-secondary impacts of the project, which has involved 5,429 students at 51 high schools in Manitoba and New Brunswick since 2004. The project’s two interventions are the following: (1) Explore Your Horizons (EYH), which offers students enhanced career planning and better information about post-secondary programs, and their costs and benefits, early in the high school years; and (2) Learning Accounts (LA), which, during the early years of high school, provides non-repayable financial aid to students from lower-income families should they go on to pursue post-secondary education.

The project set out to test whether these interventions, offered either separately or in combination, would increase high school students’ chances of enrolling in post-secondary education. The current report presents the primary impacts of interest to the study, i.e. students’ participation in post-secondary education. It also presents results from a cost-benefit study, a summary of the implementation results, and includes results from the National Longitudinal Panel (a qualitative study of a sub-sample of participants’ decisionmaking, intended to gain insight on the mechanisms underlying the pattern of program impacts).

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This report presents the latest results from the Life After High School project. The results from the previous Life After High School report (Ford et al., 2013) supported the notion from behavioural economics that relatively small differences in approach (the 'nudge' of three hours of workshops) can have major consequences for behaviour in that it induced many more Grade 12 students to complete postsecondary applications. But surprisingly, across all students and pre-identified subgroups, the intervention did not lead to an increase in post-secondary education enrollment in the year immediately following high school. This final evaluation report seeks to answer outstanding questions about whether students were motivated to access postsecondary education later by staying on in high school for an extra year or for longer by persisting in their studies. The analysis of additional data in this study allows for the detection of additional enrollment among those in program schools and thus improves understanding of youths' behavioural responses to such nudge approaches. The main outcomes do not provide strong evidence to support the hypothesis underlying Life After High School, which is that 'nudging' Grade 12 students to make applications to postsecondary education and for financial aid, will increase participation in postsecondary education.

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