Nesta has put evidence at the heart of its grant making decisions, writes Vicki Sellick, Director of Nesta’s Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund. In doing so they’re supporting grantees to develop and improve their ability to...

Conversations about evidence base policy often treat RCTs and big data as mutually exclusive but there is no good reason to do so, writes Michael Sanders, Head of Policy Research at the Behavioural Insights Team. By...

Hetan Shah, Executive Director of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), introduces the RSS’ Data Manifesto. Calling for evidence, and offical statistics to be at the heart of policy making and policy debates, the Manifesto argues for...

Numbers, argues Professor Trish Greenhalgh, are no more ‘factual’ than stories. The dichotomy between numbers and stories is false, writes Greenhalgh, instead we should recognise that both can be selected and moulded with the aim of...

An open invitation has gone out for comments on the ‘strength’ of the Department for Education’s evidence. Jonathan Breckon, Head of the Alliance for Useful Evidence, explores how the ‘strength’ of evidence can be judged and...

  What is the beating heart of a healthy evidence ecosystem? Professor Jonathan Shepherd finds that systems work best when practitioner vocation to improve services coalesces with the capacity to test solutions in rigorous experiments. This...

  Jonathan Breckon, Head of the Alliance for Useful Evidence and joint author of the new report ‘The NICE Way: Lessons for social policy and practice from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’, sets...

  The little known 1960’s ‘Slough Experiment’ was an ambitious – but ultimately failed – attempt at experimental government writes Jon Agar, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UCL. The plan was for a concentrated...

  A trusted repository of a wide range of data, the UK Data Service connects those conducting research in the public interest with data collected by range of organisations, including some of the UK’s most prominent...

A ceasefire may have been declared in the paradigm wars but ideas about what counts as real evidence runs deep argues Dr Cathy Sharp, Director of Research for Real. We lose too many chances to learn...