and engineering, and there are voluntary levies in some sectors such as film production. It is inevitably difficult to generalise, but a study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (Greenhalgh 2002) showed strong international evidence that training levies help secure higher participation in training for adult learners. This seems to support the general direction of research evidence which is supportive of the effects of an employer training levy in most national and sectoral settings. For young workers the picture is more mixed, largely because of the methodological difficulties of separating this group from other groups of workers, and because of the interaction with state funding for education routes. These make it difficult to see the effects of employer-funded training on this group as a separate factor from, say, school-based vocational training funded by the state. Nonetheless, the general direction of academic and policy research in most countries studied for this report seems to indicate a positive effect of a mechanism to compel employers to make some contribution to training in general and training for young workers specifically. 3) A further issue raised by a recent Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) report (Dolphin and Lanning 2011) looking at Apprenticeship training in different EU member states pointed out that Apprenticeships in countries such as Germany, thw Netherlands and Denmark involve much wider content than UK equivalents. They are also, by and large, regarded as highly prestigious. Both issues are related to the first point about social partnership. One of the primary reasons why Apprenticeships are so well respected in the competitor countries is that stakeholders are involved in their design and delivery which helps ensure that they are relevant and appropriate to young people, employers and the demands of society and the economy more widely. There are often also mechanisms for young people to move between vocational and academic routes. Without a national forum providing this kind of systematic overview and strategic leadership, it will always be difficult for the UK system to ensure that there are appropriate
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opportunities for young people to make secure transitions into high-quality employment. Systems of school to work transitions are nationally specific and reflect particular institutional trajectories established early in the development of universal and compulsory schooling. As a result, there cannot be any simple policy transfer from one national context to another. Nonetheless, it is clear that these institutions and processes matter in explaining issues such as the higher rate of youth employment in some countries.