Publications

Employees’ ability to influence decisions at work is one of the most important factors affecting their motivation and psychological well-being, and is also associated with good physical health. This report examines the trends in different types of employee control in British workplaces, and presents a mixed picture.

There has been a longstanding interest in the impacts of socio-spatial variations in accessibility to public and private services in both urban and rural contexts. Previous studies have found that rural communities are often disproportionately impacted in accessibility terms by changes in service configuration. The aim of this study is to examine such claims in…

The contemporary wave of neoliberal globalization has given rise to a new class of the global super-rich, whose wealth is based on a global web of financial interests, and whose lives are lived transnationally between various homes, offices and retreats (see Hay and Muller 2012). The geographies of this transnational elite have been conventionally closely…

The evaluation uses a mixed methods design, incorporating a quantitative element based on existing large-scale datasets. The evaluation reports two key, but interrelated, findings. The first is that there is strong evidence to suggest that the WBQ is enormously valuable in helping students to enter higher education. This benefit would appear to be largely due…

The Foundation Phase is a Welsh Government flagship policy of early years education (for 3 to 7-year old children) in Wales. Marking a radical departure from the more formal, competency-based approach associated with the previous Key Stage 1 National Curriculum, it advocates a developmental, experiential, play-based approach to teaching and learning The Learning Country: a…

The aim of the 2011 ESF Leavers Survey is to assist in assessing the effectiveness of labour market interventions delivered under ESF. Telephone interviews were conducted with over six thousand people who had left an ESF project delivered under Priorities 2 and 3 of the Convergence Programme and Priorities 1 and 2 of the Competitiveness…

If the race is already halfway run even before children begin school,then we clearly need to examine what happens in the earliest years (Esping-Anderson 2004).

The importance of the early years is well understood within the Welsh Government. Since 2003 work has been underway to develop effective interventions in this area, such as the Flying Start programme. However, the question of what works best and is most effective remains important. Events such as this that bring colleagues from the policy,…

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of a need for a general, non-language-specific assessment tool that could be used to evaluate general speech and language abilities in children, especially to assist in identifying atypical development in bilingual children who speak a language unfamiliar to the assessor. It has been suggested that a non-word…

Over recent decades there has been an international shift towards multi-level governance. Against this backdrop, many comparative welfare studies take government policy outputs as the starting point for their analysis. However, the associated pluralization of electoral systems in unitary states means that welfare choices are no longer exclusively informed by single state-wide ballots. Accordingly, this…