Better training to help people into employment is critical for local regeneration. But the jury's out on whether it's more effective to deliver training programmes locally or nationally
In the early days of the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth, we spent a lot of time meeting with our users (local authority officers; Local Enterprise Partnership board members and officials; other people in the local economic policy world) asking them what their most pressing concerns were, and what they would like to see the centre address.
A large proportion of those people wanted us to look at employment training interventions. From our conversations, we know that lots of them hold strong opinions about where control of employment training programmes should lie, with many local officials strongly favouring great local control.
So some of those people may have been hoping that our recent employment training evidence review would give a definitive answer about where control over employment training policy should lie.
With this in mind, we took a look at what the evidence told us about local versus national control. The short answer was: not a great deal.
As part of the searching and sifting process we identified 71 studies (you can read more on how we did that in the evidence review). They involved delivery models at various scales, from highly centralised programmes in France and Sweden to the more devolved systems common in the USA, where states have substantial freedom to design and deliver policy.
In the majority of cases, the programmes were based at national or state level. Only one of the studies we found covered a local employment training policy with sufficient methodological quality to be included. That study focused on an employment training programme delivered by New York City.
Perhaps surprisingly, none of the evaluations that we found looked directly at the question of whether programmes are more successful when they are locally, regionally or nationally specified or administered. When we simply looked at whether evaluations of regional programmes or national programmes were more likely to show positive results, no clear pattern emerged.
So what does this mean for employment training policy? What it says to us is that improved evaluation and greater local experimentation on programme targeting, design and delivery will be crucial to understanding whether greater local flexibility could improve policy effectiveness.
We’re keen to work with local areas who are considering new and innovative ways of providing their local population with the right skills and support to allow them to flourish in the labour market. In particular we want to help design programmes so that they can be rigorously evaluated, and contribute to the sum of knowledge about what works, where and why.
Lynne Miles is project manager at the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth. The centre is keen to get in touch with innovators in the field of employment training, and can be contacted at [email protected] or 020 7803 4316
