UKCES

The primary role of the strategy and performance team is to monitor the contribution and challenge the performance of each part of the UK employment and skills systems in meeting the needs of employers and individuals, and recommend improvements in policy, delivery and innovation. We also support the UK Commission’s wider advisory role to government on policies and delivery that will contribute to increased jobs, skills and productivity.

Strategic priority one – strategic, agile and demand led employment and skills system

The 2010 Review
Principal among Strategy and Performance’s activities will be both defining the criteria for a successful employment and skills system over the summer of 2009 and then carrying out a review based on these criteria by 2010. The remit of the 2010 review is to consider to what extent the employment and skills system is integrated but also the effectiveness of the system in achieving its aims. The rest of Strategy and Performance’s individual projects will feed into both defining the criteria for the 2010 review and the review itself.

Targets, measures and incentives
This project seeks to identify the right balance of measures and incentives to support high-performing delivery organisations in the employment and skills system. The project will also be asking what other drivers of high performance there are beyond targets and incentive measures.

Strategic priority two – maximising individual opportunity for skills and sustainable employment

The Youth Inquiry
The inquiry focuses on three key questions: Who and where are the young (16-24) unemployed/ inactive? What works from an employer’s perspective when recruiting a young person? How well are current government initiatives aimed at employers working? The project has a number of key stakeholders including the Commissioners, DWP, and the Scottish and Welsh Governments. Read more about this project

Information, Advice and Guidance
The overall aim of the project is to develop proposals for the transformation of information advice and guidance services by better utilising technology. This means finding ways to maximise the potential of different technologies, make best use of the information available, inspire the profession to embrace innovation and provide ‘more for less’. Read more about this project

Empowering Customers: Labelling and Scorecards
This work takes forward the proposal made in 'Towards Ambition 2020: Skills, jobs, growth’ to ‘Increase trust in, and authority to, learning providers, through the use of outcome-based public course labelling and institutional scorecards, which empower customers and communities to drive provider responsiveness, quality and continuous improvement’. Read more about this project

Employability phase two
The Employability 2 project builds on the momentum generated from the first report to keep the subject front-of-mind and secure a step change in the development of employability skills in the publicly funded employment and skills system. The aim is to ensure that publicly funded mainstream learning, regardless of its specific subject matter, prepares individuals to apply their skills and knowledge in the workplace and fosters the kind of attitudes that help individuals secure, sustain and progress in employment. Employability - phase 2 reported in June 2010. Read more about Employability

Tackling exclusion
This project aims to identify employment and skills outcomes for the most excluded, assess whether the current performance management framework incentivises work with the hardest to help and will scope options of models of delivery that will improve outcomes for socially excluded groups. Read more about this project

Customer journey
This project will assess the quality and effectiveness of the ‘customer journeys’ for clients through the whole employment and skills system. The project will include a focus on the role of the personal advisor and assess the factors that either impede or accelerate individual’s progress in the system. Read more about this project

Progression into HE
The Progression into Higher Education project was carried out by the Universities Vocational Awards Council (UVAC) looking at progression routes to higher level skills provision in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for those with applied and vocational qualifications. Read more about this project

Strategic priority three – increasing employer ambition, engagement and investment in skills

Leadership and Management
Working in collaboration with government, industry and academia focus on identifying and seeing implemented the one recommendation that would make the greatest difference to leadership and management performance. Download the report - Developing Leadership and Management Skills through Employer Networks

Employer voice
Development of recommendations that will result in system improvements to maximise the employer voice and leverage in the design of employment and skills services. Read more about this project

Simplification
From the outset of the UK Commission’s existence, Commissioners, employers and users more generally have identified the excessive complexity of the current employment and skills landscape as a substantive cause for concern and a significant priority to address. The team is taking the work forward in two phases. Phase one provided recommendations on how the skills offer to employers could be simplified (hiding the wiring) in terms of access and we are now monitoring progress against these recommendations. Phase two, which has just commenced is now looking at developing proposals for more fundamental simplification of structures, systems and programmes – a ‘rewiring’ of the system.