King's College London

This is the fourth instalment of the School for Government’s comment series on the future of evidence-based policy. Look out for more contributions to the series in the coming weeks.

Almost every government is in favour of greater equality – after all, who could possibly be against it? Of course, each government frames it differently, with some preferring to focus on establishing an equality of opportunity, rather than focusing on outcomes. New Labour was famously “... intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich … as long as they pay their taxes”, in the words of Lord Mandelson. Theresa May, on the other hand, was driven by “burning injustices”.

It is no secret that while Britain has become a more socially liberal country in general, there is still substantial intolerance and discrimination against those who have historically been marginalised, including trans people, people of colour, and people with disabilities. The circumstances of your birth and early life hugely predict later life success in a way that is entirely divorced from the distribution of talent.

The What Works movement, consisting of several centres each focusing on specific policy issues, was established to strengthen the production, dissemination, and use of reliable evidence to support better decision-making across government and public services. As such, it is ideally situated to also focus on the reduction of inequalities, and yet, despite general governmental support for the cause, there has been a lack of focus on this across the movement. In the three years since the publication of a paper by Sanders and colleagues calling for a renewed focus on equality in the What Works movement, little progress has been made. Where the network does consider inequality, it remains primarily in socioeconomic terms: the Education Endowment Foundation, for instance, focuses on young people eligible for free school meals, and not on the wider forms and structures of inequality in society such as, for example, racial, ethnic, and gender disparities, issues of disability and accessibility, or discrimination against LGBTQ+ students.

In many areas this is of course difficult – we do not routinely collect data on whether people are LGBTQ+ in a way that could be used to examine subgroup effects in administrative data. But in many other areas, this would be far from challenging. Thanks to the National Pupil Database and other sources of admin data, we know the race and gender identity of all students in schools in England, and for many of them, we know whether they have a disability or not. This data – which informs trials by several What Works centres – could easily be used to understand whether interventions differ in their effectiveness for different groups of participants. For example, we could know if interventions that raise pupil attainment on average are, in fact, making gaps wider between boys and girls, or between white and black students. After all, understanding “what works” should also mean dissecting “for whom”.

Research funded by the now-defunct What Works for Children’s Social Care looked at differential outcomes for young people with a social worker across a set of 62 randomised trials funded by their sister centre, the Education Endowment Foundation. Despite methodological challenges, not least of which resulting from the fact that the group of interest (ie care leavers) is of relatively modest size in terms of its proportion of all young people, they were able to conclude that effects were on average about the same size for both groups across the trials. However, they also found that the interventions that worked best for young people with a social worker were not the same as those that worked best for all other students – suggesting that targeted interventions, for example, Virtual Schools for Looked After Children – could help narrow attainment gaps.

As for all of the other groups we’ve described at this stage, we just don’t know what we don’t know. For some trials, looking at these differential effects would be straightforward and illuminating – someone should make a priority of this. The government could help support this by creating a “What Works initiative” – something short of a What Works centre, with a short shelf life but its own dedicated resources to focus on this over this parliament, to help us surge forward in our understanding in how to build a more equal world.