The Employer Training Pilots (ETP) were established in September 2002 to test the effectiveness of a new policy approach to stimulating employer-provided training to level 2 or basic skills qualifications for employees who were not already qualified to level 2. The approach being tested combines four different elements, namely free or subsidised training to the employees, paid time off for training (funded for either 35 or 70 hours), wage compensation paid to the employers and advice and guidance provided to employers and employees.

The pilots were initially intended to run for one year and in six local learning and skills councils in England but, since their initial introduction, they have been extended in both length and coverage. Six new councils were introduced in September 2003, and a further eight in September 2004. All three waves of pilots will run until September 2005, and the programme will be rolled out nationwide starting from 200X.

The quantitative evaluation of the pilots will exploit statistical methods to assess how much of the training brought by the ETP is additional to the training that would have occurred even in the absence of the policy. We will make use of extremely rich data from random surveys of employers and employees that were designed by IFS in collaboration with the Institute for Employment Studies and conducted by MORI in four pilot areas as well as in four areas were the policy is not in operation.

In the first stage of the evaluation we have provided estimates of the impact of ETP on the provision of training by employers in the first year (to Summer 2003), from four of the first wave pilot areas. Future evaluation work will show the impact on employer take-up in the second year (to Summer 2004), and on the take-up of training by employees.