Wouldn’t it be NICE?

First, in a piece of uncharacteristic public kite-flying, new Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood said he was investigating the possibility of a ‘What Works’ institute for the UK to fill a gap. Giving a rare interview to the Guardian in January, he said: "The question mark is whether, just as NICE has been very effective in giving a view on drugs or pharmaceutical interventions worth supporting, there is a role for a similar sort of entity or entities in the social policy intervention sphere”. Meetings are now being held to discuss what shape that might take. Meanwhile outside government, NESTA and ESRC’s Alliance for Useful Evidence is making the case for better use of good evidence. The message seems to be getting through to opposition parties. Last week, Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg announced that a future Labour government would establish an ‘Office for Educational Improvement’ (OEI), drawing on an analogy with the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), though actually NICE is a better analogy, and building on the Educational Endowment Fund already established by the Coalition. Mr Twigg set out the case for the OEI: “The Office would focus on four main areas: promoting high standards, spreading best practice, acting as a clearing house for research and aiming to improve England’s position compared to other countries. The Office would act as the authority on evidence in educations policy.” The motivation for all this: “Labour will take dogma out of the education system and put evidence at its heart”. He paid tribute to the work of Baroness Morris, former teacher and Education Secretary and her Coalition for Evidence-Based Education for promoting these ideas. Hard on the heels of the putative OEI came a Liberal Democrat policy paper on the future of policing – with a proposal for ‘evidence-based policing’ backed up by a new Institute for Policing Excellence to meet the call from the Chief Inspector of Constabulary for more evidence-based policing which can both draw on and give impetus to more experimental approaches to policing. Both these ideas look to have potential for helping inform practice in education and policing – and the latter has the potential to help the new police and crime commissioners to have a better basis for holding their chief constables to account. As Rachel Glennerster of the MIT Poverty Lab said in her recent talk here on randomised control trials, the great thing about more rigorous evidence is that it can tell you when things you expected to work don’t and why – and when interventions you thought were unpromising do. Going further The interest in what works is emerging specialism by specialism. As we pointed out in our report last year, Policy Making in the Real World, a willingness to learn from evaluation is an area which both Ministers and civil servants thought was relatively weak. We argued in Making Policy Better that there needed to be leadership from the top of the civil service to learn what makes policy effective on a systemic basis. That needs to be accompanied too by a change in the politics of evidence and evaluation. Recent announcements suggest a build of momentum. We will be exploring what needs to change to make good policy good politics in the next event in our Making Policy Better series and in May we will be looking at the role of independent evaluation offices.