CES: New policy institute hopes to inform and reform DfE

New institute hopes to inform and reform policy-making

Body set up by leading education experts wants to take classroom evidence revolution into national policy making

John Dickens

‘Deep frustration’

“The idea stems from deep frustration that we all have with the quality of policy-making,” says Freedman, a former government adviser.

Sam Freedman

“One of the reasons that we think policy-making is so sketchy, so contradictory, we get so much confusion and churn, is because of a lack of evidence and information about what is effective.”

While “big steps” have been made in evidence informing classroom decisions, “we haven’t really seen any improvement” in “the way system-level, macro policy is made”.

Instead, those decisions “still come primarily from the interest, whims, prejudices of the people who happen to be in power at any given time – and that that is an inevitable function of the lack of information available to them”.

And that’s where CES comes in.

Funded by a £345,000 two-year grant from the Nuffield Foundation, and incubated by the Education Policy Institute, it will start by overseeing international comparative reviews for curriculum and accountability.

The aim is to deliver a “deep understanding of each policy area; offer alternative approaches to individual policy initiatives; explain how policy instruments interact and develop a system architecture to help build system coherence and identify investment priorities”, a briefing document said.

Lucy Crehan

“It’s easy to make fun of politicians, but they can only work with what they’ve got available to them – and they do have to do something,” added Freedman.

“They can’t just say, ‘well, there isn’t the evidence base to make any decisions, so I’m going to sit here for four or five years and not do anything’.”

By codifying what works in different high-performing states, Freedman said he hoped the group could ultimately “build up system maps of every country – helping the whole sector, politicians and policy-makers to have a better and more informed conversation about what system reform and policy looks like”.

Stop policy cherry-picking

It also hoped to stop politicians cherry-picking policies from the latest country to score well in PISA without getting under the skin of why they might work.

Becky Francis, who leads the government’s curriculum review and is head of the EEF, said there was much to learn from international evidence and experience.

“But to date, that policy-borrowing has often been done in this sort of magpie-like fashion – in isolation from context, from data trends, or indeed often from interest in how those local policy instruments might interact together.”

The CES will dig into whether international successes are down to national policies or other things such as different behaviour or cultures across nations and so end “arbitrary and incoherent policy borrowing”.

Loic Menzies

“Our objective is not to find the “right” answer; but to increase understanding of the options, the intended and unintended consequences of each and the opportunity to evaluate what’s possible,” said CES policy documents.

Baroness Nicky Morgan, a former Conservative MP, said she found out she had been appointed education secretary with “five seconds notice”. Within minutes a reporter asked what her plan was.

“The opportunity for CES to help to bolster the person who’s appointed in a [government] reshuffle is absolutely enormous.”

But Baroness Estelle Morris, a former Labour education secretary, warned the body must steer clear from “joining the bandwagon of saying ‘the problem with policy-makers is politics’”.

“Ideally, what we get is helping us understand the [policy-making] structure – and giving politics a role in that.

“If politics can be seen to be sitting in an evidence base of policy-making – I’m hoping that that might improve the quality of the conversation between teachers and the sector and politicians. And boy do we need that.”