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We investigate the relative importance of variations in job quality in accounting for variations in general well-being among employed people in Europe, the USA, Australia and South Korea. We find that the importance of job quality is everywhere of a similar magnitude to that of health, while both are far more important than other conventional determinants, including education, gender, marital status, parental status, age or household income. Job quality accounts for somewhat more of well-being's variation among men than among women. Within the majority of European countries, the R-squared for the variation accounted for ranges between 14 and 19 per cent. The paper's findings, alongside rising policy interest, support the allocation of a greater priority for job quality in general socio-economic and labour force surveys than hitherto.

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We present new evidence on the [COVID-19] pandemic's effects on youth, for the first time focusing on perceived effects on the learning of job skills, as well as on education. The context is post-Brexit Britain. We find that 47 per cent of young people in a representative sample perceive a loss of learning of job skills, while a sizeable minority (17 per cent) judge that the pandemic improved matters. The perception of skill loss is worse among those encountering COVID directly, and far worse among those in school, college or university than among those in employment.

Among those in education, loss of learning of job skills is higher among those experiencing only online learning, but lower for those who have had some work experience. Among those in employment, loss of learning is mitigated by training, which dropped sharply at the start of the pandemic but recovered and thereafter deviated little from its long-term trend. Neither the average amount of training, nor the perception of loss of learning, were affected by being placed on 'furlough' leave. Finally, perceptions of loss of learning of job skills were greater for women than for men, and greater in Wales and Scotland than in England and Northern Ireland.

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I analyse trends in teachers' job quality in Britain, using the framework of the European Foundation for Living and Working Conditions, with data from the British Skills and Employment Survey. The issue of increasing concern is not work hours, which have remained long but stable; rather, teachers are working considerably more intensively than in earlier years. Moreover, their task discretion, their participation in work organisation and their training have declined. Their working time has also become less flexible. While the chances of promotion have increased since 1992, wages fell after 2006. Three indicators of teachers' work-related well-being - Warr's scales of Enthusiasm and Contentment, and the frequency of end-of-day exhaustion - have worsened since 2006. The changes in job quality account in part for the changes in well-being. Poor job quality is potentially important for understanding the problem of declining teacher retention.

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This review examines the concept of the quality of work and employment (QWE), including both 'Decent Work' and the narrower concept of 'job quality'. The key axiom is that 'quality' relates to the extent and manner in which working conditions meet people's needs from work. The review emphasises the multi-disciplinary nature of the topic. It discusses the concept's objective character, its relationship with well-being, and its link with productivity. Important measurement issues are considered, including cost, international comparability, the choice of how many indices, the treatment of inequality and the problem of discipline insularity. Some theories of the antecedents of QWE imply universal trends, while others predict differentiation across countries and regions, attributable to labour market institutions and policy. The effects on well-being and health are studied in several disciplines, including a substantial research programme in psychology. Summary trends in Europe and distributions of job quality are presented for context, including gender gaps. This description shows gradual improvement in the physical environment of work and in working time quality over the decade from 2005. Yet the distribution of job quality in several domains is not at all closely related to a country's GDP. The review concludes with a discussion of job quality policy making, and frames the ongoing research agenda.

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Singapore has been of long-standing interest worldwide for those interested in skills issues. This small city state has broadly succeeded over decades in maintaining a balance between the skills demanded in the economy at successive stages in its development and the skills being supplied through schools, polytechnics and workplace training, supplemented by a substantial segmented migrant workforce. Singapore also stands out for the successes of its school system, with the pupils in its schools being ranked among the highest globally in the [Programme for International Student Assessment] PISA tests. This report examines two important aspects of the supply and utilisation of skills in Singapore in recent years: the graduate labour market and the system of upper secondary education and training.

This report aims to make two specific contributions towards a better understanding of Singapore's overall skills system. The first part seeks to understand the utilisation of rapidly rising graduate skills in Singapore. To do this it uses new survey data collected by Singapore's Institute of Adult Learning, and develops new conceptual tools based on task-based analysis. It draws on previous work to define what is meant by 'graduate jobs', but then extends this work to identify jobs that make full use of graduates' skills to do what are normally regarded as graduate tasks. The overarching question addressed by this part of the report is: is the economy generating new graduate jobs at a similar rate to the rise in the numbers of graduates, and what are the outcomes for the graduate labour market?

In the second part, the report seeks to contribute new understanding surrounding the least researched part of Singapore's skills system, namely post-lower-secondary education, which we refer to as 'upper secondary education and training' for the sake of international comparability in the second part of our report. The questions to be addressed here are: How should Singapore's post-secondary skill system be characterised relative to equivalent systems around the world? Is there anything distinctive about Singapore in comparative terms, and if so, what might be the policy implications? Before it can get to answer these questions, however, the report builds on earlier analyses of post-lower-secondary education and training systems, adding new data and many more countries that enrich the comparative perspective.

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The importance of higher education among the resident Singapore workforce has been increasing. Yet there are few studies that have considered the coevolution of higher education attainment in the workforce and the utilisation of graduate skills. To do so, we have drawn on the conceptual distinction between graduate jobs and non-graduate jobs. However, we have also explicitly recognised that there is considerable variation among graduate jobs. We distinguish further between 'task-warranted' and 'task-unwarranted' graduate jobs. In both types a degree is required to obtain these jobs, but in the former, task-warranted graduate jobs the job involves carrying out typical graduate-level tasks; while the latter require only low levels of graduate-level tasks. In task-unwarranted graduate jobs, employers still require a degree because it helps sort applicants for their hard-to-observe skills - the logic that lies behind signalling and credentialism. To operationalise the distinction, and to analyse the Singapore graduate labour market, we use data on task use in two surveys, one in 2013 the other in 2017.

We find that the continued expansion of higher attainment in the resident workforce between 2013 and 2017 is met by a similarly-strong growth in graduate jobs over the period. This growth of graduate jobs can be fully explained by upskilling: an increasing use of graduate-level tasks within jobs. The share of task-warranted graduate jobs expanded sharply from 21 per cent to 32 per cent of jobs, while the share of task-unwarranted graduate jobs fell slightly. Despite these positive signs, it remains the case that about 1 in 3 employed graduates were in jobs that were on average not making full use of graduate skills.

Complementing these trends in supply and demand, the pay premium associated with higher education remained stable and high: graduates' pay was more than double that of secondary school leavers. Yet there is dispersion among graduates' pay, and in particular a wage penalty of 35 per cent for underemployed graduates in 2017. There was a much smaller wage penalty (16 per cent) for being in an task-unwarranted graduate job as opposed to a task-warranted graduate job. Neither of these had significantly changed from 2013. In both years attainment and utilisation of a degree is stratified by parents' highest level of education. Given the very substantial pay premium, and the considerable pay penalty for underemployment, this stratification is likely to have adverse consequences for social mobility in Singapore.

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Training has been important for prosperity for a long time, but several factors heighten the need to broaden and deepen the skills of Britain's workforce for the coming two decades. Among the most telling are: the jobs and skills challenges posed by the spread of robotics and the use of artificial intelligence in all sectors of the economy; the longer and more variable careers that stem from an ageing population with later retirement; the persistent regional and socioeconomic disparities across Britain; and the growth of insecure forms of employment or self-employment. In the context of a post-Brexit Britain, with probable declines in the extent to which employers will be able to draw on migrant labour from European Union (EU) countries at all skill levels, the trend in training has acquired a particular urgency. At least 86 per cent of Britain's workforce, and still a big majority (65 per cent) of the 2040 workforce, is already in work today. An upskilling of the workforce cannot therefore rely only on upgrading the education system. To a considerable extent this upskilling will need to be delivered through job-related training for workers of all ages. In this report we present a picture of how job-related training has been trending in recent years, for those already in the workforce.

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We analyse the prevalence and effectiveness of out-of-school-time (OST) study programmes among secondary aged students, focusing on their potential for reducing socio-economic gaps in educational achievement. Compared to several extant studies, including the only prior study for Britain, whose findings could be affected by heterogeneous participation in the programmes, our results derive from a rich dataset with multiple controls for social background, personal motivation, and school characteristics. We find that programme participation in England is relatively low among students from families with long-term unemployed parents and those in routine occupations. Participation is also lower outside London, and especially outside large cities. Our results show that OST programmes, as long as they are teacher-led, are moderately effective in improving the academic performance at the end of lower secondary education as measured by the GCSE total score. Teacher-led OST programmes compensate for previous social disadvantage. The policy implications include a focus on expanding programme availability and on incentives for participation, and attention to the regional disparities.

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Through their social exclusivity, private schools are held to have contributed negatively to social mobility among older generations educated in the 20th century. But with huge fee rises, increased income inequality, increased wealth-income ratios, fluctuating public and private means-tested support for fees, and a greater emphasis in public policy on school choice, there may have been changes in the distribution of participation in private schooling. This paper studies whether there has been a notable evolution over recent decades in the social and economic composition of the children who attend Britain's private schools. Where possible we have triangulated the description, using data from multiple surveys and aggregate information from censuses.

Our main findings are as follows: (1) the proportion of school children from UK-resident families who are at private school has remained fairly constant and now stands close to 6 per cent; about one in ten adults had been at private school at some point; (2) private school fees have trebled in real terms since 1980; despite rising incomes, the average fee for one child has risen from 20 per cent to 50 per cent of median income - for most, therefore, fees have become less affordable out of current income; (3) participation in private school is concentrated at the very top of the family income distribution; however, even in the top five per cent of the income distribution, only a minority attend private school - thus raising the salience of understanding parents' motives; (4) leading motives for parents to choose private schooling are the wish for their children to gain better academic results through smaller class sizes and better facilities, and to mix with a preferred peer group; the peer group motive is masked by social desirability bias when using conventional survey methods, but is revealed through alternative methods; and (5) we found no evidence that participation in private schooling has become less socially and economically exclusive in recent decades: both in the period 1994-2000, and in the period 2001-2016, just under half of private school families came from families in the top decile of the income distribution; between 2004 and 2014, there was no change in the proportion of private school parents who belong to the managerial and professional classes; the cross-sectional income elasticity of participation is nearly zero across most of the income spectrum, but increases at very high incomes; at the 98th percentile it is estimated to be 2.1; in this sense, for the very rich private schooling is a luxury good; conditional on income at this percentile, the wealth elasticity is estimated to be 0.57; and there was no significant change in the pattern of intergenerational persistence of school-type between the periods 1996-2005 and 2006-2013.

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Drawing on nationally representative data for British employees, the article argues for a more comprehensive concept of job insecurity, including not only job tenure insecurity but also job status insecurity, relating to anxiety about changes to valued features of the job. It shows that job status insecurity is highly prevalent in the workforce and is associated with different individual, employment and labour market characteristics than those that affect insecurity about job loss. It is also related to different organizational contexts. However, the article also shows that the existence of effective mechanisms of employee participation can reduce both types of job insecurity.

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