Mobilise - Trailer - Sally Hogg

Mobilise Podcast by PEDAL Centre

Welcome to the Mobilise Podcast, a new mini -series from the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. This podcast was developed to help people who are trying to harness the power of research to improve children's lives and life chances. Through six episodes, we'll delve into the relationship between research, evidence and children's policy through conversations with leading policymakers, politicians and influencers in the UK. My name's Sally Hogg and for nearly 20 years, I've been working in children's policy.
At 21 I graduated from Oxford having studied Developmental Psychology and I became a fast streamer in the Department for Education and Skills in Westminster. With a head full of the science of child development, I soon became puzzled about how civil servants were expected to be generalists without any specialist expertise in the areas in which they developed and delivered policy. After working in national and local governments and in charities, I'm now a Policy Fellow in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge.
My role involves helping policymakers in national and local governments to use knowledge from research in their work to improve children's lives. This is an unusual role in UK universities and one made possible by funding from the LEGO Foundation. Research evidence can help us to make children's lives better. It's one part of a jigsaw, alongside data, professional expertise and insights from communities that can all help decision makers to understand not just what works, but what will work best for this child, this family, this community and this context.
It's not always easy to use evidence in policy making. Politicians and policymakers are constantly required to balance their knowledge of what works with constraints created by limited resources, tied electoral timescales and political commitments. The different priorities, considerations and pressures faced by policymakers and researchers can make it difficult for them to work together.
There are ways in which they can and can collaborate to harness their different insights and expertise. We wanted to explore all of this with people who've spent many years, often decades, working in children's policy, both inside and outside of government. In this podcast, I explore with our guests how they did, and sometimes didn't, use research to improve people's lives and what lessons might be learnt by researchers and policymakers in the future.
I'm hugely grateful to our guests for taking the time to talk to me and for sharing, often quite candidly, their recollections, the things they're proud of and what they'd wish they'd done differently. Anecdotes shared by our guests, which involve everyone from cabinet ministers to country and western stars, all illustrate the challenges and opportunities that arise when trying to use evidence in complex political environments. There are varied perspectives expressed in my conversations.
Some guests share positive reflections on the use of evidence, others are more sceptical. Some guests recollect the same policy decisions, such as the expansion of Sure Start, but with differing points of view about its success. All of this illustrates just how complex and interesting the world of children's policy can be, and there are lots of lessons to be learned. I do hope that you enjoy this podcast, and whether you work in policy and research yourself, or you're just listening out of interest.
I hope you come away with valuable insights about what can be done to improve children's lives and life chances. Thank you for listening.