Background: Knowledge brokering plays an important role in the evidence-to-policy system, but little is known about whether and how it occurs within government departments. Aims and objectives: Using empirical evidence from one UK government department, this article analyses how knowledge brokering takes place inside the policy making process and…

Policy and research engagement is a timely topic for researchers, decision-makers, and higher education institutions that aim to promote engagement and impact. Examination of the complex research-policy relationship in the higher education sector has been largely overlooked. This paper addresses this issue by presenting findings from in-depth…

Scopus, EBSCO, ERIC and British Education Index were interrogated in a systematic review of primary research since 2014 addressing expert practice and outcomes in education and care for young people with special educational needs and disability in the UK. Grey literature and studies of medical settings, preschool children, mainstream education or…

This special issue examines how relationships between research and policy in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) can be strengthened. Our contribution draws on three cases from outside the ESE space to analyse policymakers' perspectives on using evidence to inform decision-making, and to show that government-based policymakers develop…

Background: Anti-welfare narratives depict welfare systems as overly-permissive, open to fraud, and fundamentally unfair. Countering these supposed ills have been political appeals to evidence and reforms made to disability benefit assessments under the banner of objectivity. But objectivity is a complex construct, which entails philosophical and…

I examine the ways in which words such as "evidence" are used inappropriately to support policy that may be formulated for convenience, cost or political dogma. I interrogate the processes by which this happens, as words and terms are bestowed with symbolic power to support and promote favoured policy. I examine the ways in which such…

University education is known to generate significant earnings returns, but its full value may be understated without considering its wider effects on individual wellbeing. This paper estimates the complete lifetime return to higher education in the UK by combining income effects with monetised wellbeing effects. Building on recent evidence, we…

A considerable proportion of quantitative research remains unpublished once completed. Little research has documented non-dissemination and dissemination bias in qualitative research. This study aimed to generate evidence on the extent of non-dissemination in qualitative research. We followed a cohort of qualitative studies presented as conference…

To reach rational conclusions, we often draw inferences about the evidence that supports one solution over another. This evidence can be "direct" and indicate why one option is correct, or "indirect" and indicate why the alternative option is incorrect. Understanding how young children interpret and use different types of…

The aim was to investigate the association between experiencing a therapeutic relationship and subsequent authenticity. Forty-six clients completed the Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory (B-LRI), Relational Depth Inventory (RDI), a measure of the therapeutic alliance (ARM-5) and the Authenticity Scale (AS) at intervals over 10 therapy…

University participation gaps between free school meals (FSM) and non-FSM students have remained largely stable in the UK since 2006. The efficacy of UK widening participation (WP) interventions in changing attitudes towards university and increasing participation of disadvantaged students is uncertain. Some approaches have shown to be effective…

Civil society organisations increasingly mediate the creation and exchange of evidence in their activities with policy-makers and practitioners. This article extends knowledge on evidence in policy-making settings to civil society contexts. As an exploratory and qualitative study, it shows how nine UK-based organisations working on issues…

Background: Co-creation in policymaking is of increasing interest to national governments, and designers play a significant role in its introduction. Aims and objectives: We discuss instances from our fieldwork that demonstrated how UK Policy Lab used design methods to gain insight into the design-oriented methods introduced to policymakers'…

This dissertation consists of three papers about quantitative research methods in education. Each paper is a response to potential limitations of the current approach to building evidence for effective education -- an approach that is dominated by Randomized Controlled Trials of school programs, with mathematics and English achievement as primary…

This report aims to set out a preliminary understanding of what is and is not known about how children and young people's experiences of systems of support impact on their involvement in serious violence, based on a review of a sample of evidence from the Systems Evidence and Gap Map (EGM), an interactive tool published by the Department for…