Considering the challenges associated with continued growth and demographic changes, the government of Qatar is interested in updating its school transportation system (STS). RAND Europe helped to assess the perspectives of parents and school administrators, identify a vision for the STS, and discuss strategies to achieve it. The four elements of the vision: providing safe, efficient, and high-quality transportation; enabling mobility and access; supporting Qatari values and culture; and minimizing the impact on traffic congestion and the environment.
UK higher education institutions have developed collaborative relationships with organisations outside the education sector for many years. These cover diverse activities including research, teaching, and project work, and their scale and range has changed significantly over time. RAND Europe and the LFHE analysed recent collaborations to provide recommendations on structuring leadership, management, and governance in order to effectively set up and implement emerging innovative relationships.
The National Policing Improvement Agency wants to ensure the adequacy and modernisation of the British police workforce. An innovative econometric approach developed by RAND Europe allows researchers to estimate crime rates and the number of police officers needed to control crime in Britain, and offers local governments the opportunity to consider how to save money on policing while still maintaining public safety.
The economic crisis of 2008 undid much of Europe's progress in employment and economic growth over the previous 20 years. Vulnerable populations in particular have suffered the brunt of the impact. Improving their labour force participation and reducing income inequality will require social investment in policies that complement welfare approaches to social insurance and allow individuals to achieve their full productive potential and participate in the labour market.
Despite a range of legislative and policy interventions, the trade in illicit art and antiquities continues to flourish, resulting in damage to the arts, scholarship and heritage. Through an exploration of existing intervention tools, two case studies and a set of key informant interviews, RAND Europe demonstrates the existing difficulties in curtailing the market in cultural property and explores the potential for new policy interventions.
The University of Cambridge's arts and humanities research provides myriad local as well as societal benefits, including impacts on academics, policy, and practice. RAND Europe utilised a 'payback framework' methodology to assess and document these impacts, which also include the preservation of buildings, languages, and literature; the generation of income from fees, grants, and revenues; and the development of improved curricula for schools.
To aid government officials who seek to improve the control of error, fraud and corruption (EF&C) in their social protection programmes, and World Bank staff assessing EF&C control in client countries, RAND Europe developed a toolkit to assess interventions. The toolkit is based on recent Bank missions in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Bangladesh and builds on a previous RAND Europe report for the UK National Audit Office (NAO) on fraud and error controls in the social security systems of eight OECD countries.
Online access to large, high quality data collections has led to a deeper level of sharing and analysis, potentially accelerating and improving the quality of scientific, technical, and medical research. Libraries have a potentially important role to play in facilitating long-term access to these resources, but the role of a national library in this realm remains unclear. The British Library has asked RAND Europe to help it explore alternatives and develop a strategy to facilitate access to relevant datasets in the biosciences and environmental science.
This review is tasked with developing an evidence base for potential action to improve the health and wellbeing of NHS staff; as well as making practical recommendations for improvements. The review was initiated by the Department of Health and is headed by Dr Steve Boorman. Working in partnership with The Work Foundation and Aston Business School, RAND Europe led on the literature review, staff perception survey, the call for evidence, and the identification of supporting international good practice work.
In March 2009, the RAND Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition hosted a workshop giving analysts, planners, decisionmakers and interested lay observers from many countries a collaborative opportunity to explore new methods and tools that can help improve long-term decisionmaking. They considered when it is important to make long-term (as opposed to short-term) decisions, how to make better long-term decisions, and how best to support policymakers in thinking long term, using as case studies the areas of education, international policy, and climate change.
A study for the British Academy investigates evidence for the role of language skills in academic research in the humanities and social sciences in UK universities. The British Academy has concerns about declining abilities of UK born and educated individuals to use language skills.
Digital repositories can help Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to capture, identify, store and retrieve such intellectual assets as data-sets, course material and research papers. The leadership of these institutions, however, has been concerned about the awareness of and commitment to repositories and their sustainability in the future. This research brief informs universities and other HEIs about the different motivations for using and investing in digital repositories and highlights potential ways of addressing the challenges of embedding these repositories in institutional strategy and daily operation.
The General Teaching Council commissioned RAND Europe in 2008 to undertake a literature review to inform its thinking and preparations as it develops proposals for a new accountability framework for teachers in England. GTC is responsible for contributing to improving the standards of teaching and the quality of learning, and for maintaining and improving standards of professional conduct among teachers.
The Government is concerned that poor educational outcomes translate into inadequate mastery of basic math skills in later life. In a survey conducted in 2003, almost one in three adults in England could not calculate the area of a floor, in either square feet or metres. To contribute to a UK National Audit Office study on Value for Money in education, we reviewed the evidence base of the reforms aimed at improving mathematics teaching for pupils aged 4 - 10 in England since 1999. We focused on reforms that are aimed at maths education specifically, not at primary schools in general.
The Vital Communities programme provides creative and artistic activities for children, their families, and wider communities in nine locations across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. RAND Europe was asked to evaluate the available evidence and data from a rigorous and analytical point of view in order to examine the effects attributable to the Vital Communities programme. RAND Europe provided recommendations on how best to take forward the research element of Vital Communities.
The National Audit Office commissioned RAND Europe to undertake a comparative study investigating the implementation of education programmes for 14-19 year olds in The Netherlands, Sweden, and Australia, in order to identify lessons that could lead to improvements in implementation and delivery of the new 14-19 Diplomas.
The digital revolution has fundamentally modified the way research is conducted, but also the way in which its results are circulated, reviewed, accessed and preserved. Libraries can no longer rely on stacking a print copy of a publication on one of their archive shelves. RAND Europe's report,
Digital preservation: The uncertain future of saving the past, examines how research findings will be communicated in the future to help librarians and archivists preserve history.
In 2006-7 Arts Council England ran a large inquiry that it called 'the arts debate', including research and consultative processes aimed at finding out what people value most about the arts and what principles they think should guide publicly funded arts organisations. RAND Europe was commissioned by Arts Council England to gather and summarise qualitative feedback about perceptions of the impact and processes of the arts debate thus far, from a group of prominent individuals whom the Arts Council regarded as thoughtful, knowledgeable, and belonging to key stakeholder groups.
The digital revolution has fundamentally modified the way research is conducted, but also the way in which its results are circulated, reviewed, accessed and preserved. Libraries can no longer rely on stacking a print copy a publication on one of their archive shelves. Established models of archiving and preservation of scholarly output need to be rethought. RAND Europe has examined the key determinants of the sustainable digital preservation of scholarly publications, with specific reference to developing a robust approach to the archiving of such records at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Netherlands.
A study for the National Audit Office compares and contrasts retention and participation rates in international Higher Education systems. The aim of the study is to put the performance of United Kingdom higher education institutions in comparative perspective and uncover interesting practice in the countries studied to improve retention rates.
The Sutton Trust commissioned RAND Europe to undertake a brief review of the use of lottery/ballot systems in admissions to schools. Evidence suggests that schools are becoming socially selective in the United Kingdom; trends in school admissions on the basis of catchment areas might exacerbate social inequality. The new draft School Admissions Code came into force in September 2008, allowing schools to allocate places through the use of a lottery system. The underlying reason is that lotteries are seen as a fair and transparent way to distribute school places and promote equal access to educational opportunities. This raises questions about how and why lotteries have been used, how lottery schemes have been designed, and what the outcomes associated with lottery schemes have been.
The Museums, Libraries and Archives (MLA) Council is the lead strategic
agency for museums, libraries and archives in England. It is part of the
wider MLA Partnership, working with nine regional agencies. With the aim
to develop an inclusive strategy for all 10 MLA Partnership members, the
responsible team of officers asked RAND Europe to examine the research
commissioned by the 10 organisations in recent years. The study provided
an evidence base and informed other strands of MLA's strategy.
To identify specific, transferable lessons for process improvements at Jobcentre Plus, the UK government employment advice office, RAND Europe benchmarked the deployment and management of personal advisers in three employment advice providers: Tomorrow's People, a non-governmental organisation in the United Kingdom; WorkDirections, a private sector provider in the United Kingdom; and the Centrum voor Werk en Inkomen (Centre for Work and Income), an independent government agency (Zelfstandig Bestuursorgaan) in the Netherlands.
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