‘… procrastination, which we sometimes call ‘research’ …’
Michael Morpurgo, Author
Several years ago, I had a meeting at the Cabinet Office to discuss the progress being made for young people in care, at which the emphasis was very much on ‘outcomes assessment’. There are, indeed, far too many initiatives introduced which gather a life of their own without delivering the goods: it’s essential for Government to ensure that results are forthcoming, in the same way that efficient businesses are managed.
There's a swathe of new projects currently being undertaken by Government; we heard about some of them in last week's Spring Statement, with its emphasis on capital spending for defence and housing designed to substitute for more conventional economic growth. Later this spring, we will hear more about the plans for reducing child poverty, which is also the focus of a Prospect magazine seminar in London on Thursday 3rd April.
The challenge of political outcomes assessment cannot be left to the electorate alone; it needs continual ‘non-experimental evaluation’, and changes need to be made as required in an ‘iterative design process’. But, in a swiftly changing world, this must surely be a more productive and dynamic approach to introducing new initiatives than traditional academic research, with its hypotheses, tightly-defined parameters, small-scale pilot activities, and hotly-debated randomised control comparisons.
I recall a couple of years ago attending an economics seminar in Cambridge, to be confronted with a sea of complex formulae and lists of defining restrictions beyond which the research results could not be taken as being reliable. Having personally been schooled in engineering logic, I found the experience somewhat baffling — for example, how could economists in HM Treasury make use of such tightly-defined and inflexible research work? The answer, of course, is that they don't.
Political parties have to make value judgments all the time, most of which are underpinned by their long-held political ideology: that's why you didn't hear anything about the ‘End of the Road for Universality’ in last week's Spring Statement, even though it is gradually dawning on Labour politicians that, if genuine progress is to be made with targeting support on those most in need, welfare has to say farewell to universality. Even the Reform party has started to call for insurance-based healthcare, as they managed to include in a backdrop photograph to Health Secretary Wes Streeting as he spoke in Runcorn in preparation for the May local elections:
Child Poverty is becoming one of the big issues of our time. For several years, we have commented on the long-term failure to break the cycle of deprivation with inter-generational rebalancing. Although the new emphasis on defence and house-building may provide a limited amount of employment for some young adults, it will not resolve the big challenge of ensuring that young people from low-income backgrounds reach adulthood with some financial resources and with financial awareness life skills.
That's why The Share Foundation's work over the past twelve years is so important. Its establishment of starter capital accounts for young people in care, its focus on delivering matured Child Trust Funds for young people from low-income backgrounds who are wholly unaware of their good fortune, and its ground-breaking achievements in introducing incentivised learning for financial awareness life skills, are delivering very positive outcomes. Over a quarter of a million young people have thus far benefited from its work in the first two of these areas, and well over 1,500 young people in care have achieved extensive participation in its Stepladder Plus programme, resulting in significant reductions in their NEET status at 19.
Throughout the past ten years, the Charity has employed ‘non-experimental evaluation’ and an ‘iterative design process’ as it has pioneered new approaches. It has introduced new initiatives in scale, supporting all local authorities and young people throughout the United Kingdom, and it has flexed and changed its operating arrangements as circumstances and outcomes have required. This has required philanthropic investment alongside the arrangements established by Government, both those for young people in care and for the previous Labour Government’s Child Trust Fund scheme.
Traditional academic research is finding it increasingly difficult to deliver meaningful results in a world which is changing so fast. The parameters which are set to evaluate hypotheses are continually at risk of becoming irrelevant as real-world dynamics require their adjustment, and it is only non-experimental evaluation which can maintain a close liaison with the changing demands of our time. It is, of course, very important that such evaluations should be independent and objective in character, but it does enable momentum to be maintained throughout.
Resolving the challenge of Child Poverty is a real test for the traditional research approach. In conversation with a range of research experts, it has become clear that some still rely on traditional techniques to steer the use of significant sources of funding, such as dormant assets. We must hope that the Child Poverty Task Force adopts a more progressive approach when it publishes its initial findings later this Spring.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio