The UK should get ready for science-based government, says Michael Brooks
In your wildest dreams, could you imagine a government that builds its policies on carefully gathered scientific evidence? One that publishes the rationale behind its decisions, complete with data, analysis and supporting arguments? Well, dream no longer: that's where the UK is heading.
It has been a long time coming, according to Chris Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department for Education. The civil service is not short of clever people, he points out, and there is no lack of desire to use evidence properly. More than 20 years as a serving politician has convinced him that they are as keen as anyone to create effective policies. "I've never met a minister who didn't want to know what worked," he says. What has changed now is that informed policy-making is at last becoming a practical possibility.
That is largely thanks to the abundance of accessible data and the ease with which new, relevant data can be created. This has supported a desire to move away from hunch-based politics.
Last week, for instance, Rebecca Endean, chief scientific advisor and director of analytical services at the Ministry of Justice, announced that the UK government is planning to open up its data for analysis by academics, accelerating the potential for use in policy planning.
At the same meeting, hosted by innovation-promoting charity NESTA, Wormald announced a plan to create teaching schools based on the model of teaching hospitals. In education, he said, the biggest single problem is a culture that often relies on anecdotal experience rather than systematically reported data from practitioners, as happens in medicine. "We want to move teacher training and research and practice much more onto the health model," Wormald said.
Test, learn, adapt
In June last year the Cabinet Office published a paper called "Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing public policy with randomised controlled trials". One of its authors, the doctor and campaigning health journalist Ben Goldacre, has also been working with the Department of Education to compile a comparison of education and health research practices, to be published in the BMJ.
In education, the evidence-based revolution has already begun. A charity called the Education Endowment Foundation is spending ?1.4 million on a randomised controlled trial of reading programmes in 50 British schools.
There are reservations though. The Ministry of Justice is more circumspect about the role of such trials. Where it has carried out randomised controlled trials, they often failed to change policy, or even irked politicians with conclusions that were obvious. "It is not a panacea," Endean says.
Power of prediction
The biggest need is perhaps foresight. Ministers often need instant answers, and sometimes the data are simply not available. Bang goes any hope of evidence-based policy.
"The timescales of policy-making and evidence-gathering don't match," says Paul Wiles, a criminologist at the University of Oxford and a former chief scientific adviser to the Home Office. Wiles believes that to get round this we need to predict the issues that the government is likely to face over the next decade. "We can probably come up with 90 per cent of them now," he says.
Crucial to the process will be convincing the public about the value and use of data, so that everyone is on-board. This is not going to be easy. When the government launched its Administrative Data Taskforce, which set out to look at data in all departments and opening it up so that it could be used for evidence-based policy, it attracted minimal media interest.
The taskforce's remit includes finding ways to increase trust in data security. Then there is the problem of whether different departments are legally allowed to exchange data. There are other practical issues: many departments format data in incompatible ways. "At the moment it's incredibly difficult," says Jonathan Breckon, manager of the Alliance for Useful Evidence, a collaboration between NESTA and the Economic and Social Research Council.
Hearts, minds and funding
There are economic issues. Most of the predictable areas where data and evidence would be useful span different departments, and funding for research that involves multiple government departments is near-impossible to come by at the moment. "Only counter-terrorism gets cross-departmental funding," Wiles says.
And those at the frontline of all this may also need convincing. Some teachers have already expressed reservations. There may be problems with parents not wanting their children to take part in education trials. For instance, in a control group they will feel left out of innovation; in the experimental arm they will worry that the old ways were better. What's more, teachers may be tempted to halt a trial early if they feel it is not helping students.
Nevertheless, the government is working with NESTA and a range of backers to create a set of institutions dedicated to gathering evidence that will impact on public policy. One example is the Early Intervention Foundation, which helps local government evaluate schemes that help preschool learning amongst children who would otherwise enter standard education at a disadvantage.
There will be announcements of more initiatives in the next few weeks, says Geoff Mulgan, NESTA's chief executive . "We're hoping this year the UK will jump a step ahead of every other country in the world in having a set of institutions dedicated to generating evidence and helping it to be used in day-to-day decisions."
Profile: Michael Brooks is a science writer and New Scientist consultant. His latest book is Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science, published by Profile/Overlook
Michael Brooks is a consultant for New Scientist
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