Publications

This report presents findings from new research comparing the job quality, other than pay, of private and state school teachers in post-pandemic England and Wales, including those based at elite private schools, based on a survey of private and state school teachers who are members of the National Education Union. Information was obtained from 14,212…

This study investigates the evolving demand for graduate skills in the British workforce, leveraging a task-based approach with data from the Skills and Employment Survey Series. Focused on the changing importance of job tasks related to graduate skills, the research explores the mapping of these tasks to educational attainment, discerns the price employers pay for…

The quality of the education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. But this Government has made the profession less and less attractive to new graduates. This important report exposes how hard teachers’ working lives have become. It makes a clear, succinct and powerful case that the intensity of teachers’ work is unsustainable.  The…

Research undertaken before the pandemic showed that the job quality of teachers in Britain had been declining in two key respects for a number of years. First, their work was becoming much more intensive, meaning that the rate of their physical or mental input was increasing, just in order to cover their required workloads. By…

Innovation is traditionally viewed as an activity which involves a small band of highly skilled workers. By examining the results of a British survey of employees, this article breaks with this approach. It makes two distinctive contributions. First, it provides new insights into the extent to which employees of all kinds come up with ideas…

This article presents new British evidence that suggests that cutting working hours at short notice is twice as prevalent as zero-hours contracts and triple the number of employees are very anxious about unexpected changes to their hours of work. The pay of these employees tends to be lower, work intensity higher, line management support weaker…

The government has accepted the Taylor Review‘s recommendation that it should report annually on job quality in the UK. This article argues that three principles need to be followed in choosing the right measures and shows how these principles have been used to create a short job quality quiz (www.howgoodismyjob.com).

Insecurity at work can take several forms – the risk of job loss, the difficulty of securing a replacement job with an equally good one, anxieties about the job being downgraded, worries about being treated badly at work, and sudden and unexpected changes to hours of work. This report examines the scale and distribution of…

Participation at work is an important determinant of personal well-being and is considered to be a key factor for enhancing motivation and productivity in technologically advanced economies. The report examines trends in different types of participation among British workers, some of the factors that were associated with them and the implications of participation for worker…

This report shows how the intensity with which people work while doing their jobs has changed in recent years.