Employer Ownership Pilot Evaluation

The Employer Ownership Pilot for BIS offers employers direct access of up to £250m of government funding to design and deliver their own training solutions. The pilot encourages businesses to engage with innovative training solutions in order to reduce skills gaps and generate additional economic impact, such as improved business performance. The overall aim of this evaluation is to provide evidence of the impact of the pilot and an assessment of whether giving employers such direct access to public funding has increased or improved their investment in skills, or enabled them to demonstrate more effective ways of improving skills in the workforce than they can currently achieve through mainstream funding. Our objective will be to gather evidence from employers, providers and learners using methods a range of methods to ensure that we can evaluate the pilot processes, assess the impact and determine whether the pilot achieves value for money.

The evaluation will be delivered over a five-year period commencing in autumn 2012 and concluding with a final report in September 2017. The evaluation utilises a quasi-experimental approach including CATI and online surveys which track employers and learners who are involved in the pilot and a counterfactual group; depth interviews with employers and providers; and case studies with individual projects.

Key project contact

John Higton

John joined CFE in October 2014 and became a Research Director two years later. CFE’s research and evaluation studies concerning the economy and further education fall under John’s leadership, alongside CFE’s wider educational offer. John strongly contributes to teaching policies including evaluation financial incentive schemes targeting teacher recruitment and retention, and professional development activity across all educational phases. Higher education policy areas such as open access to research and impact analyses of nationally important data collections are also areas of research interest. John leads many of CFE’s market-sizing studies, research with employers and many of CFE’s behavioural insight projects.

Contact: john.higton@cfe.org.uk