Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy

Experimental Government Team

The Experimental Government Team supports local and national governments to embrace innovation and experimentation, working with a range of clients. The team has three key work themes:

The use of behavioural science in government, including running rapid experiments and randomised trials to see how the design of communications or policies themselves can influence behaviour.
Machine learning and data science in government, including the use of natural language processing to make better sense of the text data held by governments.
Helping make better use of data, for example building data infrastructure to facilitate more, better, and cheaper analysis and evaluations in future.

The team has substantial experience working with a data varying from small scale surveys to large administrative datasets. We have worked with partners around the world to better understand their public services and programme delivery and to help them to deliver bet outcomes for the people they serve. We have worked with or for the vast majority of the UK's "What Works Centres", including the Education Endowment Foundation, Youth Futures Foundation, Youth Endowment Fund, Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes, What Works Centre for Wellbeing, and What Works for Children's Social Care.

Alongside our work with partners, we also produce research on a range of areas relating to evidence based policy, including recent papers on What Works and Equality, and how to build a high quality evidence base faster. The team have forthcoming books on the use of behavioural science in policy around the world, and on the history, challenges and future of the What Works movement.

If you are interested in finding out more about the team, pease get in touch with Professor Michael Sanders.