Governments have always been expected to use evidence to inform policy positions. The COVID-19 pandemic has created intense challenges for government decision-makers and shone a light on the use of evidence in government decision-making. It is expected now more than ever that policy-makers will have a firm understanding of how evidence should be deployed to understand policy problems, analyse their underlying causes, and build the case for possible policy solutions.

Policy and project professionals must navigate internal and external data sources including administrative data, publicly available datasets, research findings and evaluations to decide how to respond to a range of increasingly complex challenges. Policy-makers have a huge range of qualitative and quantitative evidence sources that they are able to access or commission. They must decide what evidence sources they will source, prioritise and utilise to inform their work.

This half day masterclass will explore the types of evidence available to policy-makers and how policy-makers they can improve the generation, synthesis and translation of evidence for senior decision-makers. The session brings together insights from the fields of evidence-based policy, decision science and collective intelligence to support policy professionals to build their evidence toolkit.