Funding opportunity coming soon: Evaluation Accelerator Fund
Categories: Funding opportunities, Office for National Statistics, Children & young people, Climate & sustainability, Crime & justice, Health & wellbeing, Housing & communities, Inequality & social inclusion, World of work
9 February 2022
ADR UK is working with the Evaluation Task Force to support the academic delivery route for the Evaluation Accelerator Fund.
About the fund
The Evaluation Accelerator Fund will provide a total of £15 million funding across the 2022/23, 2023/24, and 2024/25 financial years to improve our understanding of ‘what works’. What works is an initiative that aims to improve the way government and other public sector organisations create, share and use high quality evidence in decision making.
The key aims of the fund are to:
- Accelerate evaluation activity and the creation of actionable evidence in government priority areas to inform decision making at the next spending review.
- Tackle evidence gaps in government 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 Accelerator Fund encourages ambitious projects that could have a transformative effect on how particular policy areas are understood. It is expected to fund both one-year and multi-year projects throughout the lifetime of the fund. UK government departments, public bodies, or associate members can make applications to form a project.
Eligibility and applications
ADR UK is supporting the sourcing of academic individuals or teams to work with government departments on their projects.
Interested academic applicants can bid to undertake specific policy evaluations or programmes of work using linked administrative data (via the Office for National Statistics Secure Research Service). Once fundable bids are approved by the Evaluation Task Force, ADR UK will manage the commissioning of individual academic or academic team projects that use administrative data.
If you are interested in evaluation work using administrative data, email your expression of interest using 'Evaluation Accelerator Fund' as your subject line. You can also sign up to our mailing list for future funding announcements.
The deadline for government department and public body applications to the Evaluation Accelerator Fund projects is 1 April. ADR UK then expects to be able to announce the relevant academic project opportunities by Wednesday 18 May. We will then accept short bids for these academic project opportunities, to be submitted by Wednesday 20 July at 4pm.