CR&DALL Core members, Muir Houston and Catherine Lido together with Professor Keith Kintrea of Urban Studies have been successful in securing funding from Skills Development Scotland and the SGSSS-Doctoral Training Programme (DTP), for a co-funded postgraduate 'industry strategy’ studentship under the aegis of National Productivity Investment Fund.
The proposal is on the topic of "Chances or Choices? Influences on Young People's Learning Decisions in the Glasgow City Region and the Implications for Employer Engagement". They will be seeking to recruit over the summer months.

The abstract of the proposal is as follows:

In spite of the universal support for employer engagement in education, and a widespread acknowledgment that young people need more help to make informed choices about their learning, many key questions remain unanswered. They include: what services can employers best provide? Does employer engagement impact on attainment and skills development, and how? How influential is exposure to work on young people¹s career interests and knowledge of routes into work?  There are also important questions about whether employer engagement really helps to bridge or to extend social divides. Do young people get different benefits from employer engagement according to social background or school, particularly when more advantaged schools may already have access to networks of alumni, and well connected parents (Huddleston et al, 2014).  This PhD aims to more fully understand the relationship between subject choices and attainment and post school outcomes, and how and under what circumstances employers can best help shape learning experiences and learning choices, with a focus on disadvantaged areas in the Glasgow city region.

The work dovetails with the Education and Place strand of our work in the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC).