The policy evidence cycle

A cosy idea for many of those working in an area of public policy such as education is that policy-making is evidence-informed. Policymakers and their advisers come up with ideas for changes in policy, which may or may not be based on solid research evidence. Some of these ideas are implemented and can be evaluated in terms of their policy objectives. Policy-makers and their advisers then react to this newer evidence, and the improving cycle of policy continues.

In reality, of course, the cycle is nothing like this. In education, new policies and interventions are rarely based on good prior evidence of effectiveness and of their side effects. Many policy areas are evidenceresistant, and examples of these are discussed in this book. Evidenceresistant here means that the policies are proposed and implemented, even though the clear weight of evidence is against them. Of the rest, too many policies are still not evaluated robustly at all. This means we can have no good idea whether they work as intended and whether they have damaging side effects. Of the few that are robustly evaluated, as far as this is possible with live policy issues, many are then found to have been ineffective or even harmful. But their ineffectiveness does not lead to them being improved or cancelled. The policy cycle does not seem to permit policy-makers to backtrack like this. Rather, policies are seemingly just left to wither or until they are formally reversed by a change of government. Again, examples are described in the book. This leads to at least three kinds of damage to society.

First and most obviously there is the cost. Large amounts of public and other money are spent around the world on educational initiatives that have no basis in evidence and little chance of working, and are continued overlong once their ineffectiveness has been revealed. Second, there is the possibility of harm from untested interventions for those learners in every generation who have only their one chance to get it right. There is always a kind of opportunity cost, given that every unwarranted policy uses time, effort and resources that could have been used for a genuine improvement.