Credit: 2024 Alejandro Salinas Lopez “alperucho”.

2 December 2025

By Jessica Ko

In an era where policy decisions increasingly demand robust evidence, science-policy organisations (SPOs) are emerging as pivotal actors in shaping more equitable and effective public systems. However, extant research has largely focused on the role of the individual knowledge broker rather than organisational factors in the policymaking process. This is a research gap that our British Academy-funded research project hopes to address. (more…)

Credit: Antenna on Unsplash.

18 September 2025

By Rob Davies

In the world of academic research, producing groundbreaking studies is only half the battle. The other half (arguably the more challenging part) is ensuring your research actually influences policy and practice. At CLOSER, we’ve learned that knowledge mobilisation and policy impact is like an iceberg: what you see on the surface is just a fraction of what’s happening beneath. (more…)

Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones with Keri Wong and UCL Institute of Education students. Credit: Courtesy of Keri Wong.

16 September 2025

By Keri Wong

‘A day in a life…’ is an excellent role-play experience for children dreaming big and teenagers wanting to find out about career options – but why not have this for academics, too? Like many academics, I’ve spent most of my career trying hard to publish, not perish. This year, however, I got the chance to extend my policy-related networking, this time with a visit to the House of Lords, where scientific evidence is used to scrutinise, ‘sense check’ and inform government decisions. (more…)

Credit: tonefotografia via Adobe Stock.

26 November 2024

By Veronica Osorio Calderon and Mukdarut Bangpan

The growth of Evidence-Informed Decision-Making (EIDM)

Evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) is the idea that decisions, particularly in policy, should be based on the best available research, along with other factors like public opinion, costs and practicality. As an approach, it aims to make decision-making more systematic and transparent by using a structured way of identifying and applying research evidence in policies.

EIDM has gained significant traction in recent years. This was especially clear at the Global Evidence Summit in Prague in September, which brought together 1,800 attendees to discuss the role of evidence in policymaking. Just shortly afterwards, UK Research and Innovation and the Wellcome Trust committed approximately £56.5 million to further EIDM, globally. This latest example of funding to support EIDM is dedicated to advancing “living evidence” initiatives and, specifically, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance evidence use in policymaking. (more…)

Adapted from 9george / Adobe Stock.

4 July 2024

By Charlotte Booth, Claire Crawford, Vanessa Moulton

Every new government likes to put their own stamp on the National Curriculum – with varying use of evidence to support their changes.

The next government is sure to be no different, no matter who wins today. While the UK’s two main parties have campaigned on very different platforms, there is one issue where the Conservatives and Labour do agree – the importance of maths. (more…)

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4 June 2024

By Dominic Wyse

This is the first of four blog posts about primary education from the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy (HHCP) at IOE. Each post addresses key points that are included in a new HHCP briefing paper written to inform debate about education in England as we approach the general election. The four posts are:

1. In the hands of a new government: the future of primary education in England.
2. Children, choice and the curriculum.
3. Hands on learning: a progressive pedagogy.
4. Assessment in primary schools: reducing the ‘Sats effect’.

Children from age four to eleven have a natural thirst for learning, and a quickly developing capacity for independent learning. This is a golden opportunity that must not be squandered by a national curriculum and pedagogy and assessment systems that fail to reflect the best evidence we have. While we have heard some welcome proposed manifesto promises about early years, secondary and further education, primary education is in danger of being neglected. 

England’s national curriculum, statutory guidance on pedagogy, such as that on literacy, and statutory assessment systems reflect a level of control by government that is unprecedented in the history of curriculum development in England, and which is an outlier internationally. The agency of all actors in the system needs rethinking. (more…)

Several factors as far back as childhood can be connected to experiencing an early menopause. View the full infographic (Image: Centre for Longitudinal Studies).

4 March 2024

By Darina Peycheva, Alice Sullivan, Meghan Rainsberry and Ryan Bradshaw

The age a woman reaches the menopause is strongly influenced by her genes, but our research suggests that non-genetic factors can also play a role.

Menopause usually occurs between 45 and 55 years of age. If menopause occurs before the age of 45, it is referred to as ‘early menopause’. Our research looks specifically at early menopause that occurs spontaneously, but menopause can also occur following certain surgeries, medications or other treatment. (more…)

Credit: Cavan via Adobe Stock.

2 November 2023

By Claire Cameron and Eva Lloyd, Visiting Professor, UCL

A growing research literature has demonstrated that positive experiences early on in life are associated with more positive adult outcomes, so investing early is key for societal wellbeing. Central to this is the children’s workforce, from health visitors to early childhood education and care practitioners and social workers. In a newly published edited volume from past and present TCRU researchers, Social Research for our Times (UCL Press), we examine how social research and policy can interact (or not) to achieve progressive objectives for children and the professionals who provide their care. Whether the research is ‘strategic’ (with a longer-term orientation) or ‘tactical’ (more…)

Credit: Mary Hinkley for UCL.

31 October 2023

By Peter Moss

In a contemporary context of profound transitions and converging crises, it seems time to reconsider and reprioritise the role that social research can play in creating public policies, including services, that are relevant to rebuilding a world that is more just, more democratic, more sustainable and more caring. In this scenario, strategic social research, including an element of experimentation, may have a major part to play in what has been described by one commentator, Geoff Mulgan, as ‘expand[ing] our shared possibility space, the options for our societies… to populate our fuzzy pictures of the future with complex, rich, plausible [i]deas, pictures of the possible’.

Such concerns and such an approach are not new; they were founding principles of the Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU). They have, though, not always been easy to sustain. As TCRU marks its 50^th anniversary, it is an important moment to reiterate that broader (more…)

What Matters in Education series from the ESRC Education Research Programme.

16 October 2023

By Gemma Moss

In the run-up to the next general election, each of the political parties is beginning to set out what they see as the key issues in education and what they would like to change. This is a good moment to review the extent to which party-political priorities reflect concerns widely shared by the general public, the practitioner community and the research community – and the role the research community might have in helping to shape that debate. Just how research, policy and practice can best interact are live questions for the social sciences. (more…)