MetroPolis

✨ With Christmas Day less than a week away, we wish you a joyful and peaceful winter holiday. Thank you for your support in 2024—we look forward to achieving great things together in 2025! 🎅

🎄Have you read our MetroPolis newsletter yet? Catch up on all the end of year updates below! 👇 Plus, it includes a guest blog by the Work Foundation on how the government can help people get back to work! 🌟

🌟 To Get Britain Working Again, We Need to Focus on Job Quality 🌟 The UK labour market faces significant challenges: 6.8 million workers are stuck in severely insecure jobs, struggling with volatile pay and unpredictable contracts. As the Labour Government sets an ambitious target to raise the employment rate to 80%, the question isn’t just how to get people back to work — but how to ensure they access secure and sustainable jobs. In our latest blog, written by Aman Navani, Research and Policy Analyst at the Work Foundation we explore: ✅ How insecure work is often a trap, not a stepping stone. ✅ The disproportionate impact of insecure work on individuals with health conditions and older workers. ✅ How severe job insecurity creates barriers to career progression. ✅ Policy recommendations to prioritize Good Work in employment support, moving beyond the outdated “any job is better than no job” approach. With insights from Dr. Katy Jones of Manchester Met’s Decent Work and Productivity Research Centre, this blog highlights the urgent need for a shift in employment policy — from “any job” to “good jobs.” 📝 Read the full article below:

Tomorrow afternoon, Policy Connect are partnering with Make UK to host #Manufacturing businesses from across the country for a winter parliamentary reception that will celebrate the sectors importance to the UK economy.     Ahead of the reception, Policy Connect’s Rob Allen has reviewed the Government’s #IndustrialStrategy Green Paper, arguing that a renewed focus on #Skills is key to ensuring an Industrial Strategy drives job creation, sector expansion, and economic growth.     Read Rob’s article here: https://lnkd.in/enuiK7YB. 

We are pleased to be celebrating the Manchester Met Festival of Research 2024! We have a whole series of events to celebrate research endeavours across our University; including this event taking place next week where you may meet Paralympian Beth Moulam PLY and Professor Janice Murray discuss how co-created research can shape policy-making and drive societal change.

We are pleased to be celebrating the Manchester Met Festival of Research 2024! We have a whole series of events to celebrate research endeavours across our University; including this event taking place next week where you may meet Paralympian Beth Moulam PLY and Professor Janice Murray discuss how co-created research can shape policy-making and drive societal change.

We are pleased to share that Policy Evaluation and Research Unit (PERU) will be hosting a book launch event for their publication titled below. Do join for the chance to learn more, meet the team to learn more about the case studies within this book and to buy a copy at a discount:

With devolution on the government's agenda, what is the future of academic policy engagement? Here, Universities Policy Engagement Network (UPEN) reflect on what this means in an increasingly decentralised policy engagement landscape 👇

Due to popular demand, we've increased the number of spaces available for the National Safeguarding Conference Wales, taking place on the 21st November! If you'd like to learn more about the latest developments in adult safeguarding in Wales and England, please find out more below:

I’ve been eyes deep in reports and briefings for the last few weeks and here are some things I’ve noticed about the ones I’ve found most compelling: 1) ‘How does this work?’ guides are incredibly useful for policymakers. Establishing the foundations before showing what’s new and needed is a great service. 2) I’ve really appreciated people stating their operating assumptions. Trying to work out an organisation’s hidden premises wastes a lot of time - if you have some first order principles it’s really helpful to share them. 3) Being clear who you’re speaking for stops me trying to guess. Is this analysis based on your frontline work, the involvement of people with experience of the issue or your analysis of the literature and international examples? Please tell the reader! I’m always particularly impressed when people are honest about the limitations of their research too. It's great to acknowledge other experts, organisations and resources. 4) Using statistics is wonderful but please be clear what timeframe they relate to and whether they are UK-wide. 5) Disaggregated data is the best data! Highlighting gaps between different groups of people - and how your proposals will close them if they are unfair - helps to focus minds. 6) Beautiful design, data visualisation and proper editing really makes things memorable and therefore impactful. Please don’t scrimp on this bit! 7) And finally please be clear about what readers can and should do. If you can’t imagine the reader putting something on their to-do list as a result of reading your report then you’re probably not clear enough about what you’re asking for. Huge thanks to everyone who is generating evidence, doing analysis and generating policy recommendations. It’s so appreciated and hugely important.