A decade on from the foundation of the What Works Network, an initiative designed to improve the use of social scientific evidence in the design and delivery of public services in the UK. Michael Sanders and Jonathan Breckon discuss their effectiveness and outline three ways they might be improved in the future. 

It is now a decade since the launch of the UK What Works Centres at Nesta by ministers from the Treasury and Cabinet Office – and the chief executive of the ESRC. The idea behind these centres is very simple: help busy people who make decisions access the best available social science about what works.

Ten years on, a lot has been learned, but much is yet to be achieved. To celebrate the successes and face the challenges head on, we edited a book with contributions from leaders and thinkers from across the network.

What we found from hearing directly from the centres is that it is time to step back and consider some next steps.  This has been made more urgent by the departure of a key champion – David Halpern, who finished his term in office as Cabinet Office What Works National Adviser in 2022, a post he held from the launch of the centres in 2013.

Reflecting on the lessons learned from across the network, with chapters of the book contributed by leaders of most extant centres, we believe that there are 3 broad areas that need addressing for the Centres to continue to flourish in the future. These are data; a strategic approach to growth; and collaboration.

1. Better, more useful data as standard

Richard Thaler, the economics nobel prize winner, said that ‘we can’t do evidence based policy without evidence’. We would add to this that ‘We cannot do evidence without data’

What Works Centres are able to be most successful when it is easy to measure the outcomes they care about. The Education Endowment Foundation’s biggest asset may not be their endowment, but the sheer volume of education data that exists in England, and the fact that it is accessible to researchers – letting us for example understand the effects of education interventions for young people with a social worker.

The UK government has supported the creation of a number datasets – the hospital episode statistics dataset; the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset, and others that are set to transform research in the areas they cover – but more could be done first to collect more useful data as standard – and make it available for research.

2. A more strategic approach

The What Works Centres have largely come into existence independently of each other, often in response to a minister’s agenda. As such, the topography of the What Works Network makes for curious observation.

What is done is done. Instead of re-arbitrating the past, the government and other funders have the opportunity to consider new centres strategically. While reluctant to create another framework, one that we have found useful in prioritising projects within a single What Works Centre might be usefully applied here to the meta question. This approach encourages us to focus on the ‘three M’s’;

• Many – how many people are affected by a policy area?
• Misery – when people experience negative outcomes (or fail to experience positive ones) how bad is it?
• Money – how much do government and others spend on this?

There are some policy areas where all three M’s apply – we might think about climate change, for example – but we needn’t meet all three to consider an area worth building an evidence base.

3. Greater collaboration

We also see the need for much more cooperation between What Works Centres. We take the point that ‘collaboration for collaboration’s sake’ is not desirable, and may even be counterproductive.

However, collaboration between centres is both sensible from a financial point of view (how many different trials or systematic reviews including Triple P or multi- systemic therapy do we

Need? Or standards of evidence?), and increasingly reflects the way that professionals at the frontline are expected to behave – especially when working with young people. We need to create more opportunities and spaces for more joined-up work.

Consider, for example, one of the greatest social issues of our time – inequality (which is the topic of one chapter of the book). Inequality is an issue which causes a lot of misery to a lot of people, and its economic consequences are as profound as its social ones. Nonetheless, inequality is also a many headed beast. Any ‘What Works Centre for Equality’, would quite naturally focus on education, employment and health. If focusing on racial inequality, it might focus more on policing; if gender, on economic growth; and if sexuality and gender identities, on mental health or homelessness. Inequality is a problem that exists for all What Works Centres, in the policy areas where we try to effect change; in the research we conduct and commission, and in the makeup of our own organisations.

There is much value in embracing these opportunities for improvement in the network. Without doing so, it is unclear whether the promise of evidence based policy making can ever be achieved. As long as centres work is ad-hoc, siloed, and uses expensive bespoke datasets, the network will fall short of the transformative change it desires.

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