King's College London

On Friday 19 June, the School for Government at King’s hosted the “Learn Fast, Deliver Better: Innovating and Using evidence to reform public services” conference, in partnership with the Cabinet Office’s Evaluation Taskforce. The conference comes 15 years after the foundation of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), the first of a new wave of What Works Centres which started to be established under the coalition government. It is nearly 30 years since the establishment of NICE, which is held up as the first such centre.

It is therefore a good time for us to reflect on the progress of the What Works movement over this time, and to reflect too on the journey that is not yet complete. The promise of evidence based policy is large. For those who doubt it, we need only look to medicine. Tens or hundreds of millions of people are alive today because of evidence based medicine, a field that has only really existed in living memory. My grandmother was born into a world where nobody had heard of evidence based medicine, and my son was born into one where evidence had won the day. In the 1930s, if my grandmother had been sick, practice was overwhelmingly eminence based – the most senior person’s opinion was the one that mattered. When my son was born, the medicine that treated him was underpinned by robust, randomised controlled trials.

It is easy, with talk of people saying that we have had enough of experts, and a rise of what might be thought of as vibes based politics, to feel disheartened. It is undoubtedly the case that so many of the trials run in the last fifteen years have yielded null results, with many that promised interventions revealed to have made no difference. Furthermore, trials themselves can involve years of hard work to produce these findings. Having run many trials which have produced null results for interventions I deeply believed in, I know better than most the temptation to give up and seek methods that give more satisfying, or at least faster, results.

Despite this, I want to try and lend some optimism. Evidence based policy is winning the fight, albeit slowly and unevenly. In education, synthetic phonics has transformed the way children are taught to read. Other successes from the EEF have included the scale-up of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention. In Children’s Social Care, research commissioned by Foundations found that family group conferences significantly reduce entry to care and have led to national mandates from the Department for Education. In policing, evidence has led to greater police accountability through body worn cameras, and reductions in the use of force by officers. More young people from lower income backgrounds are attending university thanks to evidence. These victories are just some among many – including people deciding to stop doing things that aren’t working.

The What Works approach has not transformed policymaking as quickly as I hoped, or perhaps even expected it would when I was first introduced to the idea. This is probably because of optimism bias on my part. Movements that have created lasting change – like the trade union movement or evidence based medicine, have done so not over years, but decades, and their progress requires constant attention, reminding ourselves why they matter, and remaining strong in the face of backsliding. The change we need will not come overnight, but it will come thanks to the hard work of thousands of people inside government and out, making small steps, and remaining resilient in the face of setbacks. The road ahead is hard, but the journey, as much as the destination, is worthwhile.