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A spotlight on education policy making
Between 2019 and 2022 a small team called edpol.net was committed to understanding aspects of English policy making, given the school perspective that policy change was too frequent; it came from many directions; initiatives were not given time to bed-in; teacher workloads were increasing and "wicked" problems were not being addressed (e.g. weaknesses in SEN provision; “the failing third”; an incoherent skills and vocational provision).
The overall conclusions were as follows:
There are a range of structural weaknesses, at least in the English Education policy making process
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In England, education policy is particularly centralised, there is a ministerial revolving door and the high level of policy churn leads to workforce dissatisfaction (see page 20)
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Taking curriculum as an example, there is a long history of ad-hoc change, other jurisdictions follow a considered process and this could be applied to England as well
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Over 300 organisations in the education eco system are caught up in the narrow, short-term cycle of change
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Interviews with nine former Secretary of States illustrate why there is a need for longer term planning and FED has considered means to approach this.
Within this somewhat dysfunctional system, there is insufficient generation, mediation and promotion of evidence
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There is insufficient high quality evidence to support decision making, particularly at the macro-system level
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There is also little mediation of system level evidence
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In contrast, the NHS invests significant amount in system thinking
Many people are seeking a CES type institution that collates, reviews and synthesises existing evidence to support policy makers
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30 people in the existing policy making process were interviewed and the views on research showed the need for a comprehensive, trustworthy, source of comparative evidence
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Two roundtables hosted by EPI confirmed concerns about the evidence gap and the need for an “ideas library”
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CES reviewed potential institutions worldwide and could not find an existing organisation
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