SKOPE

Bert Clough was until recently Research and Strategy Manager to Unionlearn. It is the TUC organisation that supports union-led strategies for increasing the quantity, quality and diversity of learning and skills opportunities for the workforce and is core funded by BIS. Bert Clough’s research interests include the role of social partnership in vocational education and training systems on which he has had a number of articles and chapters published in academic journals and textbooks. He has been a member of a number of awarding bodies including Edexcel’s Council, City and Guilds Education Committee and the QCA Qualifications Committee. Bert Clough is Visiting Professor, Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change, University of Leeds Business School. He has also been a member of the European Commission’s Advisory Committee for Vocational Training.

He is a member of SKOPE’S Advisory Committee and chairs its Public Policy Forum.

You can contact Bert at b.clough947@btinternet.comor tel: 01962 850866

Hubert Ertl is a SKOPE Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Higher Education at the Department of Education, University of Oxford. He is also a Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He directs the Department’s MSc Programme in Higher Education. His research interests include international aspects of higher education, vocational education and training, EU educational policies, the transfer processes between education and training and the world of work, and widening participation in higher education.

Hubert can be contacted by email at hubert.ertl@education.ox.ac.uk or by telephone on 0044 1865 274044.

Ken Mayhew is the Director of SKOPE and is based at the Department of Education, University of Oxford and at Pembroke College. He is a labour economist and has published widely in this area. His research interests include: the economics of education, with particular emphasis on higher education; organisational strategy and the choice of product specification, associated production processes and human resource management practices; the measurement and the meaning of skill; the workings of the labour market; productivity; distributional outcomes. Currently he is working on: an international project on changing social models and their impact of change on the labour market; unemployment in OECD countries; skills, productivity and performance; the distributional outcomes of the expansion of higher education and its impact on vocational training; the alleged polarisation of the UK labour market and the implications for education and training.  Ken is chair of an Advisory Committee for the OECD’s  PIAAC survey, which is currently in the field, and a member of the international advisory committee for the OECD’s LEED project.  In recent years he has advised the DfES, the DTI, the European Commission, as well as a number of skills agencies at home and abroad. He is an editor of Oxford Economic Papers and of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, as well as being a member of the editorial board of the Oxford  Review of Education.   Ken can be contacted by email at: ken.mayhew@pmb.ox.ac.uk or by phone on: 01865 611010.

Susan James is a Research Fellow in SKOPE based in the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Her research interests include: theories of learning, school-to-work transitions, VET systems, apprenticeship, work-based learning, on-the-job and off-the-job training, and low skill/low wage work. Current research projects include working with Ewart Keep examining models and theories of recruitment and selection (R&S) to try to understand R&S practices as a critical point in mediation and exchange between the labour market, a job and government policy. Susan is the Principal Investigator of an ESRC funded research project (RES-000-22-4343) titled, 'Graduates on the property ladder:  Skills, work and employment in a graduatising industry' researching the supply of graduates into the labour market and the impact on a focus profession: real estate agents. Susan has recently completed work on a study of low skill, low wage occupations, focussing on food processing operatives and room attendants in hotels in England, funded by the American-based Russell Sage Foundation. She was also involved in the second phase of this project which compared and analysed low wage work in the food processing industry, particularly meat and confectionary processing, in five European countries and the USA. Susan supervises master and doctoral students in the areas of her research interests. Susan can be contacted by email at: susan.james@education.ox.ac.uk or by phone on: 01865 611007.

Craig is interested in many areas of labour economics, particularly where related to public policy. His recent focus has been on the labour market mobility in segmented or increasingly polarised labour markets, and the role that skills and education play in creating or overcoming these barriers. He is also interested in the economics of higher education.

His doctoral research focuses on planning for retirement. He is interested in behavioural and experimental economics approaches to the analysis of retirement and saving policies.