Jonathan Breckon is the Director of the Alliance for Useful Evidence. He has over 15 years’ experience in policy, research and public affairs. His expertise lies particularly in brokering relationships between decision-makers and researchers from across disciplines – social sciences, engineering, science and the humanities.
He was previously Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). He has also worked at the Royal Geographical Society, the British Academy, Universities UK and as a consultant working on a government-funded project developing quantitative skills in the social sciences. He is on the board of the Society for Evidence-Based Policing.
People are hacked off with politicians. Whether it’s hurling abuse at MPs outside the House of Commons, or the burning barricades of Gilets Jaunes in Toulouse, discontent is in the air. The evidence movement must respond...
A growing wariness between what is fact and what is fiction in recent years has been highlighted by increased political polarisation, a fractured media and the accelerated pace of technological change. The Evidence Initiative, the recently launched...
Jonathan Breckon provides a guide to the Results First Clearinghouse Database, which brings together the evidence base for over 2,500 US programmes. Could it provide a model for something similar in the UK? Earlier this summer,...
At the Alliance we have been arguing for ages that the evidence community needs to learn more about the use of research by policymakers and professionals. What exactly helps people to use evidence? We need more...
Away from the despairing talk of ‘post-truth politics’, governments in countries such as the UK, Australia, Canada and France have been setting up important new institutions whose job is to reinforce evidence, and indeed truth, in...
Greg Wilkinson (Traversum) and Jonathan Breckon (Alliance for Useful Evidence) on the development of a new What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care. At the National Children and Adult Services conference in Bournemouth this morning, the...
So the temptation is just to plough on. Keep calm, ignore the Trump and Brexit tumults, and carry on proselytising for evidence. Perhaps eventually things will calm down. But they won’t. Whatever you think about the...
'Using Evidence: What Works?' a discussion document based on The Science of Using Science project, set up by the Alliance for Useful Evidence and funded by the Wellcome Trust and What Works Centre for Wellbeing.
Jonathan Breckon shares 6 simple ways to make your professional training course more effective – based on the evidence. The UK training industry is big business. The private market is worth around £3 billion and there’s 12,300 providers....
Update February 2016: A new version of the map is available here. Stephen Bediako (The Social Innovation Partnership) and Jonathan Breckon (the Alliance for Useful Evidence) would like your feedback on a new map of the UK...
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