Description
Location
If successful this role will be based in either Glasgow, Manchester, London or York.
Frequent travel to London will be required for this role.
About the job
Job summary
The Evaluation Taskforce (ETF) was established in 2021 as a joint HM Treasury (HMT) - Cabinet Office (CO) team to support departments to put high quality evidence at the centre of spending and policy decisions. This is a particularly exciting time to join the Evaluation Taskforce as the team’s expertise underpins a number of reform agendas at the heart of government. The team sits in Reform and Efficiency group in the Cabinet Office, alongside the public sector reform teams creating a vision for people centre, prevention first and place-based reform to public services. The team also works closely with the missions and productive agile state delivery to ensure high quality evaluation is built into the pathway to achieving our plan for change.
Post this most recent spending review, the ETF is entering a new four year strategy phase 2025-29, which is an exciting time to join the team. This coupled with the wider team’s recent announcements on both the public sector reform agenda and productive and agile state, it is a unique opportunity to amplify the criticality of high quality evidence and capacity to do high quality evaluation to wider reform agendas in a way that makes state more efficient and support better outcomes and programmes for people. ETF’s activities are organised around three core areas:
1. create incentives for departments to evaluate their programmes and policies,
2. strengthen evaluation capabilities, and
3. increase resources to deliver high-quality evaluations.
To find out more about the role, please see the attached Candidate Information Pack.
Job description
The successful candidate for this role will lead a high-performing team of twenty delivering on the three core areas above. The person will have significant line management and leadership responsibility, including supporting a culture where feedback and empowerment of all staff is prioritised, and creating flexible and integrated ways of working with key public service departments, HMT senior officials and ministers, local authorities and input from the frontline and academics.
The role involves leading a team that ensures policy development and decision-making are informed by robust analytical advice on programmes with significant public spend, such as the £5.6bn Asylum resettlement programme, the £2.9bn pupil premium, or the £2.6bn prosperity fund. This role will require the holder to rapidly develop credibility, gravitas, and act as an ambassador for evaluation. The successful candidate will need highly developed communication skills to build a consensus for change, gain trust from sceptical stakeholders, and make evidence compelling and accessible. They should be inspiring, as a significant portion of the role involves engaging with others, understanding barriers, communicating the case for change, and unblocking those barriers.
This close working includes the role holder sitting on Spending Deputy Directors meetings, Directors of Analysis meetings, and Cross-government evaluation group meetings. The role holder should also be influencing at the highest levels with senior officials and ministers.
The role will focus on using ETF's remit to support building high quality evaluations on key government priorities : particularly in the context of public sector reform and devolution to local authorities of significant funding and accountability, so the expectation is an element of the team’s capability and capacity building will be at a central, regional and local level. The successful candidate will get the opportunity to build out a coalition of senior advocates across government, particularly in the context of delivering on the ETF’s new four year strategy. A core component of the role will be to capitalise on excellent learning from this spending review to amplify use and embedding of evaluation at next the Spending Review.
The main activities of the unit are:
Building on successes of last spending review, close joint team working with HMT, rapid scrutiny of evaluation plans attached to business cases submitted to HM Treasury spending teams. Or, if no plans exist, advise spending teams on what evaluation (if any) is feasible and proportionate.
Partnership working with public sector reform teams including the newly announced community help partnership programme to support adults from reaching crisis points earlier, and test, learn and grow programme designed to test and learn from a variety of places and public service challenges all over the country, to support both to have excellent evaluation plans and live learning from their policy challenges.
Close working with mission teams and productive and agile state to support understanding what drives productivity and effectiveness, enabling more informed decisions to make the state more efficient, and reduce duplication. The team is currently supporting the building of evaluation plans for the AI exemplars portfolio, a top PM priority.
Advising and supporting departments on the design and delivery of robust, proportionate evaluation. This includes opportunities to embed experimentation into their design (e.g. testing multiple variations of a programme at the same time to understand which version is most cost effective). In line with significant devolution spending.
Acting as ambassadors and champions of evaluation practices across government and how they connect to the government’s wider policy goals, including raising the profile of departments performing excellent evaluations, and supporting those that are still improving and evolving their approaches.
Being the what works centre’s secretariat and regularly highlighting and amplifying their evidence and key role in high quality evidence and evaluation across government.
Running the evaluation accelerator fund, which is a competitive grant fund and supports research and evaluation projects that: create actionable evidence in HM Government priority areas that informs public spending or policy decisions; tackle evidence gaps in HM Government priority areas; or provide robust evidence of financial or efficiency savings from new policies, interventions, or innovative approaches to service delivery.
Person specification
Candidates must be a member of the Government Social Research (GSR) profession or have the required qualifications to become a member of the profession. If not already a badged member of GSR, then the successful candidate will be expected to align with the profession. Please check you are eligible before applying. Please follow the instructions in the Essential Qualifications - Further Information section in the candidate pack when completing your application form to provide details on how you meet this criteria.
You should then provide evidence against the Essential Experience Criteria listed in the Person Specification section of this job advert. To avoid disappointment please do not apply if you do not meet all criteria requirements.
ESSENTIAL QUALIFICATION CRITERIA:
If you are not currently a badged member of GSR:
You will be expected to become a member as part of the recruitment process. You will be asked to confirm if you hold the correct qualifications, required research and degree content percentage, and the social research methods requirements for this role. You must provide details of your qualification, percentage degree content of each module and provide full details against all of the social research methods criteria in the qualifications section of the application form and the additional question section of the application form. If this is not clear your application will be rejected.
Qualification Route:
Hold an undergraduate degree at a minimum of a 2.2.
The degree must contain substantial social research methods training (comprising around one third of modules taken on the course) including quantitative research methods and at least three of the following:
o systematic/literature reviews,
o qualitative methods,
o interpretation of data and presentation of results,
o study design, hypothesis testing and application of ethics to Research.
Mandatory Degree Content:
Quantitative methods, including: research design, data collection (i.e., questionnaire design, sampling, weighting), and data analysis (e.g., statistical analysis).
Additional Social Research Methods (at least three optional methods required):
o Qualitative methods, including research design, data collection (i.e., interviewing, focus groups, ethnography), and data analysis (e.g., thematic analysis) - optional.
o Study design, hypothesis formation, testing, and optional evaluation, application of ethics to research - optional.
o Systematic/literature reviews - optional.
o Interpretation of data (qualitative & quantitative), presentation of results, provision of recommendations/conclusions - optional.
Existing members of GSR:
If held, please state this in the additional question section on the application to let us know this, and state this in the qualifications section of the application form.
You may be asked to provide proof of membership, and we may verify this at any point in the recruitment process with the Government Social Research professional body.
If membership is not verified, then you will be withdrawn immediately from the recruitment round.
It is important that, through your CV and supporting statement, that you provide evidence of the following professional skills, breadth of experience and personal qualities for this post.
ESSENTIAL EXPERIENCE CRITERIA:
Leadership and Influence - This role requires Strategic Agility, demanding a creative and open mindset to set a robust direction while demonstrating the resilience to lead effectively through uncertainty and reform. The successful candidate must possess Credibility and Influence, quickly becoming a trusted ambassador for the value of evaluation. They must have an Entrepreneurial Drive, proactively capitalizing on strategic opportunities to broaden the team's impact and demonstrating the flexibility to adjust and pivot strategy as needed. Finally, a commitment to Inclusivity & Diversity is essential, actively leveraging varied thought and backgrounds to enrich team strategy and outcomes.
Partnering and Collaboration - This role demands an exceptional ability to build and leverage strategic relationships to mobilize joint projects and maximize cross-group policy delivery. The leader must be a highly effective delegator and enabler, actively empowering team members to take ownership and succeed, demonstrating leadership through influence rather than just authority. Crucially, they must also act as a key integrator, ensuring the team's work is seamlessly linked to and driven by the highest-level group priorities, specifically Public Service Reform and Productive and Agile State objectives.
Executive Stakeholder Management and Strategic Influence - This section highlights the need for exceptional relationship-building skills at the senior and executive levels, including proven experience navigating high-stakes financial and resource allocation processes. The candidate must have a demonstrable track record of developing and executing strategies to build senior coalitions and networks. This requires expert influencing and strategic communication skills to effectively profile-raise and articulate the criticality of evidence and evaluation to broader organizational objectives, even while successfully navigating and resolving disagreements among diverse stakeholders on evidence generation feasibility. Ultimately, the role requires a proven ability to strategically engage with Ministerial or C-Suite-level sponsors to maximize the relevance and uptake of evaluation.
Evaluation Expertise and Impact - This role requires significant experience in the design and execution of high-quality impact evaluations, utilizing both experimental methods (such as Randomized Controlled Trials - RCTs) and advanced quasi-experimental methods using complex administrative data. This experience must be hands-on, either by directly conducting or strategically managing (commissioning) rigorous impact evaluations. Essential for the role is a deep understanding and proven ability to articulate the strategic value of evaluation in policy development, focusing on its utility in informing public policy decisions. Finally, the successful candidate must have exceptional skill in embedding live learning and 'test and learn' approaches within ongoing programmes, ensuring evaluation findings are actionable and continuous.
Qualifications
You either need to be a member of the Government Social Research (GSR) profession or have the required qualifications to become a member of the profession. Please refer to the eligibility requirements in this advert and confirm here if you hold either of these requirements. If you do not hold either of these requirements your application will be rejected.
Behaviours
We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
Seeing the Big Picture
Leadership
Communicating and Influencing
Working Together
Benefits
Alongside your salary of £81,000, Cabinet Office contributes £23,465 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.
Whatever your role, we take your career and development seriously, and want to enable you to build a really successful career within the Department and wider Civil Service.
It is crucial that our employees have the right skills to develop their careers and meet the challenges ahead, and you’ll benet from regular performance and development reviews to ensure this development is ongoing. As a Civil Service employee, you’ll be entitled to a large range of benets.
This includes:
25 days annual leave on entry, increasing on a sliding scale to 30 days after 5 years’ service. This is in addition to 8 public holidays and one privilege day to mark the King's birthday.
A competitive contributory pension scheme that you can enter as soon as you join where we will make a significant contribution to the cost of your pension; where your contributions come out of your salary before any tax is taken; and where your pension will continue to provide valuable benefits for you and your family if you are too ill to continue to work or die before you retire;
Flexible working patterns including part-time or term-time working and access to Flexible Working Schemes allowing you to vary your working day as long as you work your total hours;
Generous paid maternity and paternity leave which is notably more than the statutory minimum offered by many other employers;
Childcare benets (policy for new employees as of 5 April 2018): The government has introduced the Tax-Free Childcare (TFC) scheme. Working parents can open an online childcare account and for every £8 they pay in, the government adds £2, up to a maximum of £2000 a year for each child or £4000 for a disabled child. Parents then use the funds to pay for registered childcare. Existing employees may be able to continue to claim childcare vouchers, so please check how the policy would work for you here;
Interest-free loans allowing you to spread the cost of an annual travel season ticket or a new bicycle;
The opportunity to use onsite facilities including tness centres and staff canteens (where applicable);
Occupational sick pay.
Things you need to know
Selection process details
This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.
Application Process:
To apply for this post, you will need to complete the online application process, outlined below. This should be completed no later than 23:55pm, Sunday 23rd November 2025.
1. Candidates must meet the eligibility requirements set out in the ‘Essential Qualification section of this advert; which is either to be a member of the Government Social Research (GSR) profession or have the required qualifications to become a member of one of these professions. If you are not currently a badged member of the profession to which you align, you will be expected to become a member as part of the recruitment process. To avoid disappointment please do not apply if you do not meet all criteria requirements.
Please check you are eligible before applying and follow the instructions in the Essential Qualification section of this advert. If you meet the eligibility requirements, as part of your application, you will be asked to confirm if you hold the correct qualifications, required research and degree content percentage, and the social research methods requirements for this role. You must provide full details with how you meet all of these requirements in the qualification section and the additional question section of the application form. If this is not clear, your application will be rejected.
2. A CV (max 2 pages) setting out your career history, with key responsibilities and achievements. Please ensure you have provided reasons for any gaps within the last two years.
3. A Statement of Suitability (no longer than 1250 words) explaining how you consider your personal skills, qualities and experience provide evidence of your suitability for the role, with particular reference to the Essential Experience Criteria listed in the Person Specification section of this job advert.
Failure to complete all sections of the online application form (Eligibility questions, CV and Statement of Suitability) will mean the panel only have limited information on which to assess your application against the criteria in the person specification. As part of the online application process, you will be asked a number of diversity-related questions. If you do not wish to provide a declaration on any of the particular characteristics, you will have the option to select 'prefer not to say’. See the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy for more information.
Should you encounter any issues with your online application please get in touch with us via: scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk
Assessment:
If you are successful at the application stage, you will be invited to attend a panel interview, in order to have a more in-depth discussion of your previous experience and professional competence in relation to the criteria set out in the Person Specification. We will be assessing Experience, Success Profile Behaviours and GSR Technical experience at interview.
Shortlisted candidates may have the opportunity to speak to a member of the team prior to the final interview to learn more about the role and organisation. Please note this is not part of the formal assessment process.
Full details of the assessment process will be made available to shortlisted candidates. You will be required to prepare a presentation for the final interview and you will be given the subject in advance. GSR technical skills will also be tested against the GSR Technical Framework for Chief Research Officer. A copy of the framework is here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-government-social-research-competency-framework
Please note, interviews are expected to be held in person in London.
Anticipated timeline (subject to change):
Expected shortlist date – w/c 8th December 2025.
Expected interview date/s – w/c 15th December 2025.
Reasonable adjustments:
We are committed to making reasonable adjustments in order to support disabled job applicants and ensure that you are not disadvantaged in the recruitment and assessment process. Reasonable adjustments could include; allowing extra time during selection tests; ensuring that information is provided in an accessible format; or by providing training.
If you feel that you may need a reasonable adjustment to be made, or you would like to discuss your requirements in more detail, please contact: scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk in the first instance.
Reserve lists
A reserve list may be held for up to 12 months, which the Civil Service may use to fill future suitable vacancies across government for candidates who are considered appointable following interview.
Further Information
If you are experiencing accessibility problems with any attachments on this advert, please contact: scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk
Any move to Cabinet Office from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax Free Childcare. Determine your eligibility here.
Current Civil Servants (all contract types) will need to ensure that they are still employed as a civil servant at the point of starting in the relevant new post. If their contract ends (e.g. end of FTA contract or resignation) at any point during the recruitment/onboarding process for the advertised role, they will no longer be eligible and may be withdrawn.
Please note that this role requires CTC clearance, which would normally need 3 years UK residency in the past 3 years. This is not an absolute requirement, but supplementary checks may be needed where individuals have not lived in the UK for that period. This may mean your security clearance (and therefore your appointment) will take longer or, in some cases, not be possible.
For further information please see the attached candidate information pack.
Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.
This role has a minimum assignment duration of 3 years. An assignment duration is the period of time a Senior Civil Servant is expected to remain in the same post to enable them to deliver on the agreed key business outcomes. The assignment duration also supports your career through building your depth of expertise.
As part of accepting this role you will be agreeing to the expected assignment duration set out above. This will not result in a contractual change to your terms and conditions. Please note this is an expectation only, it is not something which is written into your terms and conditions or indeed which the employing organisation or you are bound by. It will depend on your personal circumstances at a particular time and business needs, for example, would not preclude any absence like family friendly leave. It is nonetheless an important expectation, which is why we ask you to confirm you agree to the assignment duration set out above.
Security
Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.
Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is counter-terrorist check (opens in a new window).
See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).
People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.
Nationality requirements
This job is broadly open to the following groups:
UK nationals
nationals of the Republic of Ireland
nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service
Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)
Working for the Civil Service
The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.
We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).
The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.
The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.
Diversity and Inclusion
The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).
Apply and further information
This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.
Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.
Contact point for applicants
Job contact :
Name :GRS SCS Recruitment Team
Email :scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk
Recruitment team
Email :scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk
Further information
Civil Service Commission Selection for appointment to the Civil Service is on merit, on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission’s Recruitment Principles. In accordance with the Civil Service Commissioners’ Recruitment Principles, our recruitment and selection processes are underpinned by the requirement of appointment on the basis of merit by fair and open competition. If you feel your application has not been treated in accordance with the Recruitment Principles and you wish to make a complaint, in the first instance you should contact; scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk
If you are not satisfied with the response you receive you can contact the Civil Service Commission at info@csc.gov.uk and more information can be found at www.civilservicecommission.independent.gov.uk
