Knowledge about how children develop, how they learn, how they experience the world, and what promotes healthy development, is a vital tool for policymakers who are working to make children’s lives better.
PEDAL set out to improve communication and collaboration between academics and policymakers, so that policies for babies and young children in the UK could be better informed by the evidence. The team developed a new, six-month long programme for small groups of civil servants and local leaders. The programme, called “Mobilise” supported participants to learn about early childhood, and to use that knowledge to achieve impactful, evidence-based change in their work.
Mobilise embodied a “paradigm shift” in engagement with policymakers. The traditional approach to academic engagement with policymakers focusses on the dissemination of specific research findings. In contrast, Mobilise set out to convene and curate information from different sources and to share this knowledge in ways that could support action.
The programme was different to other models and did not fit into a neat box – it blended aspects of training, networking, action learning and consultancy support. It was a holistic approach to building understanding, capacity, motivation and opportunity to make and deliver evidence-informed policy for children.
Mobilise Programme Evaluation
An evaluation of the programme showed that the approach was popular with the 15 civil servants and local leaders who joined the pilot and has helped them in their work.
“…I loved that we had time to hear from academics, policymakers, babies, front line practitioners and others. We looked at the policy area from a range of different and important angles. It was a course that directly impacted how I think about and deliver my work…” – Participant, Final Survey
Participants enjoyed how the programme was designed in response to their needs, and shaped by their feedback, and that it was relational, providing plenty of opportunities to develop new networks and connections.
“In all other professional development programmes, I have been on the content has been pre-set. One of the strengths of Mobilise was the real sense of gathering the groups requirement’s and shaping a programme in response to those.”
Programme participants also got out and about, meeting children and families in different settings across Cambridge to build a deeper and richer understanding of the evidence and its applications.
“Much deeper and richer, with an important balance of visiting real settings, speaking to children and families, balanced with building understanding of evidence and research, and ways to apply to policy making.”
The evaluation suggested that the programme reinvigorated participants’ passion for their work, and improved their capability to make and implement effective, evidence-based policy in five broad ways:
- Improving their knowledge and understanding of both the science of early childhood development, and how to implement evidence-informed policy.
- Creating an openness to new insights, and an awareness of the diverse forms of evidence that are available to draw on when making decisions.
- Increasing confidence to advocate for early childhood and to use evidence in decision making.
- Improving their communication skills and ability to make compelling arguments.
- Strengthening relationships and networks, to enable them to draw on a broad range of insights and expertise.
All participants agreed that they were working differently because of participating in Mobilise. The evaluation gives examples of how content from the programme generated new insights and informed policy discussions and decisions. Participants are also seeking and using evidence from a wider range of sources as a result of the programme.
This evaluation took place over a short timescale so could not capture the impact of the programme on children but does suggest that the programme has had a positive impact on policymaking.
The PEDAL team are keen to ensure that learning from this programme supports anyone else designing and delivering activities to support evidence-informed policy making on any social policy issues. The evaluation report, available on pedalhub.net identifies transferable lessons from the project.
This project shows how a thoughtfully designed programme, dedicated funding and specialist expertise can overcome the systemic challenges that make it hard for academics and policymakers to collaborate. Mobilise temporarily bridged the gap between two worlds – the university and the civil service. The project team point out that significant changes in culture and ways of working are needed in both these institutions to enable meaningful sustained collaboration between researchers and policymakers in the future.
Summary
- Government policy plays a vital role in children’s lives. It is therefore important that policymakers have a good, evidence-based understanding of early childhood development and what promotes healthy development.
- There is a widely recognised gap between evidence and policy. The ways in which universities and the civil service operate make it hard for policy makers and academics to collaborate in meaningful ways.
- The Mobilise evaluation shows that the programme had a positive impact and led to improvements in participants’ knowledge, capabilities, motivation and networks, in ways that are supporting policy development and implementation.
- The evaluation draws out lessons from this project for anyone designing and delivering activities to support evidence-informed policy making on any social policy issues. It shows that programmes like Mobilise can “bridge the gap” between two very different worlds: universities and the civil service.
