Evaluation Accelerator Fund

The EAF provides a total of £15m funding across the 2022/23, 2023/24, and 2024/25 financial years to improve our understanding of ‘what“what works’.works”.

The key aims of the fund are to:

• accelerate evaluation activity and the creation of actionable evidence in HMG priority areas to inform decision-making at the next spending review
• tackle evidence gaps in HMG priority areas by rapidly building the evidence base where departments and What Works Centres are not currently undertaking activity
• provide robust evidence of financial or efficiency savings from new policies and interventions, or innovative approaches to service delivery

The Evaluation Task Force and the Cabinet Office announced the first wave of successful projects on Tuesday 2nd August 2022. The 16 selected programmes will receive a combined £12.2m to deliver top-quality evaluation activity in key policy areas, which supports a key commitment of the Government reform agenda to deliver better for citizens.

Selected projects are led by a range of government departments and What Works Centres. They will help fill evidence gaps across high-priority areas including crime and justice, education, social care, and health.

The first wave of selected projects is listed below. A more detailed table summarising the cost of each bid, including matched funding contributions, is attached above.

Selected projects

Tackling drug misuse in prisons

Lead organisation(s): The Ministry of Justice and Her Majesty’s Prison & Probation Service

This project will fill an important evidence gap in assessing the impact of drug testing in prisons by testing the feasibility of wastewater-based surveillance (WBS) in prisons, before running randomised control trials to assess the most cost-effective method(s) to identify/deter drug misuse and to support prisoners to live a drug-free life.

Using linked justice system administrative data for quasi-experimental evaluations

Lead organisation(s): The Ministry of Justice and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

The Ministry of Justice and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) will use data to explore individuals’ interactions across justice services (courts, prison, and probation) over time, and assess how changes in policy changes impacted issues such as reoffending.

Police Drug Diversion (PDD): A realist impact, process and economic evaluation

Lead organisation(s): The College of Policing

Current police drug diversion (PDD) schemes will be tested to assess their impact and establish how to reduce costs and maximise benefits when policing low-level drug offenders. The project will evaluate the effects of PDD on crime, health and other outcomes.

Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Evidence Building Fund

Lead organisation(s): The College of Policing

The College of Policing will work with the National Police Chiefs Council and the Home Office to identify promising interventions aimed at tackling violence against women and girls. The most promising interventions will then be robustly tested through experimental methods.

Reducing youth reoffending in London with tailored Youth Offending Service (YOS) support

Lead organisation(s): The College of Policing

The College of Policing and The Met Police will test how to support children at risk of reoffending who currently receive ‘No“No Further Action’Action” (released without charge) at their second arrest including testing the impact of extending non-statutory Youth Offending Service support.

Healthy and sustainable diets programme

Lead organisation(s): The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

65 government agenciesdepartments including including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Food Standards Agency, Department of Health and Social Care, Department for Education, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and Economic and Social Research Council, will test how effective interventions such as dietary information campaigns, community food networks and cost/content of food are at encouraging and enabling healthier and more sustainable diets for all.

An Economic and Impact Evaluation of the Effectiveness and Scalability of Local Pathfinders to Reduce Child Poverty

Lead organisation(s): The Scottish Government

The Scottish Government will test pathfinder programmes which provide holistic support to help families at risk of poverty. Small-scale studies will be run initially, meaning they can be tested to find what works before policies are scaled up any further.

What works for Kinship care and Special Guardianship Orders?

Lead organisation(s): What Works for Children’s Social Care

What Works for Children’s Social Care will work with local authorities to understand how their interventions impact their ability to attract and provide support to Kinship Foster Carers and Special Guardians.

Evaluation of Staying Close

Lead organisation(s):What Works for Children’s Social Care

What Works for Children’s Social Care undertake an evaluation of the impact of the national rollout of “Staying Close”. The programme was set up to help young people leaving residential care by continuing to provide support and helping them find nearby accommodation.

Cash transfers for care leavers

Lead organisation(s): The Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI)

The Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI) will evaluate the impact of providing a one-off cash transfer to young people leaving care. Through this, CHI hopes to reduce the high rates of homelessness in this group and track longer-term impacts on health, employment and wellbeing.

Evaluating Interventions to Reduce Homelessness Among Care Leavers

Lead organisation(s): The Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI)

The Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI) will identify how initiatives from central or local government such as Staying Put, which allows young people leaving care to remain in close contact with their foster carers (in many cases continuing to live with them) reduce the risk of homelessness.

Supporting children and families affected by domestic abuse in early help and Children’s Social Care

Lead organisation(s): The Early Intervention Foundation

An evaluation of government policies which aim to support children and families either experiencing or at risk of domestic abuse. The Early Intervention Foundation will use this work to build on evidence collected by the Department for Education to help understand how best to support vulnerable children.

Pupil Premium Evaluation

Lead organisation(s): The Department for Education

Pupil Premium, a programme of targeted funding to improve educational attainment for disadvantaged children, costs around £2.5bn per year, but this work will robustly evaluate how PP narrows the difference in attainment between disadvantaged and other pupils.

Education Endowment Foundation archive accelerator

Lead organisation(s): Education Endowment Foundation

Funding will create a world-leading resource for policy evaluation in education by improving access to Education Endowment Foundation data from 118 tests involving 1.7m pupils to other Government departments and What Works Centres.

Cohorts and Experiments Project

Lead organisation(s): The Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI)

This project will work with five What Works Centres to deliver three studies using cohort study data to explore the impacts of interventions on shared outcomes such as education and employment, engagement with the criminal justice system, homelessness and mental health.

Developing useful parameters, learning and outcomes

Lead organisation(s): The Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI)

Led by the Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI), this proposal will develop and test infrastructure and building blocks for Departments and What Works Centres to improve the quality and breadth of causal evaluation in priority policy areas. Six cutting-edge evaluations will be delivered as part of the programme in priority policy areas.

How were the bids selected?

Bids to the EAF were invited from departments and What Works Centres in areas aligned with the Prime Minister’s core missions. To encourage the best bids, and maximise the impact of the fund, the ETF undertook extensive engagement with departments. The fund is focused on supporting high-quality evaluation approaches using robust methodologies such as randomised control trials and quasi-experiments.

In total, 46 bids were received: 27 from government departments and 19 from What Works Centres. These 46 bids requested £26.6m of funding, with £9.3m matched funding pledged.

All bids were triaged to check for eligibility and then double-scored by the ETF. Consensus meetings were held to discuss discrepancies in scoring, ensure consistency in our assessment practices, and agree on an overall RAG rating for each bid. A long list of potential projects was then shared with colleagues in HM Treasury, and with the ETF Oversight Board for further feedback.

Further updates on the funded projects will be made available on this page.

Please direct any queries in the meantime to our dedicated mailbox - eaf@cabinetoffice.gov.uk.