Zoe Ferguson, former Chief Researcher in the Scottish Government, provides a brief outline of ‘the Scottish approach’ to policy making, which has significant implications for cross UK evidence exchange and analysis. The development of a distinctive...

Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive of Nesta, and David Halpern, What Works National Advisor make the case for an international platform for commissioning and funding research. Many governments – and people – around the world are wrestling...

The post-mortem on the UK’s General Election continues. Sue Littlemore, Chief Executive of the Education Media Centre and former BBC Education Correspondent, found that politicians ignored research, but journalists were interested in finding evidence. Learning lessons from...

Finding your evidence by Wikipedia or Googling can be a dangerous business. Better to use tried-and-tested databases. Below is a review of the main UK social policy databases by Rebecca Riley at the Idox Information Service covering...

A new guide to the evidence on crime by Sense About Science will help the public understand some of the dubious promised made politicians to ‘tackle’ crime, says Alex Thompson, research and policy officer at Sense About Science....

A decade ago, writes Louise Shaxson, Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute’s Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) Programme, the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) began to grapple with the challenge...

Let’s learn from the evidence in the devolved jurisdictions Whatever happens after the general election, we can be sure about one thing. Wellbeing and the evidence ecosystem will be at the heart of social policy making not...

The rise of “evidence-based policy” has resulted in confusion regarding its definition, writes Ron Haskins Co-Director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC. This makes it the responsibility of those...

Canada’s ‘evidence-based revolution’ may be in its infancy but it’s picking up steam, writes Katie Gibbs, Executive Director of Evidence for Democracy. Faced with a hostile federal government organisations like Evidence for Democracy are mobilising public...

Focusing on finding the best method for evidencing impact is distracting, argues Helen Wheatley, Assistant Director Research and Evaluation at Catch22. We should be focusing on using mixed methods to capture data on the rich and...