Keynote speakers

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Peter Tymms, Director of the CEM Centre, Durham University.

Judy Sebba, Professor of Education at the Sussex Institute.

Jon Bright, Head of Implementation Neighbourhood Renewal Unit,
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Richard Bartholomew Manager of the Children, Young People and Families Analysis Division in DfES

Sir Michael Rutter, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology,
Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London.

Terezinha Nunes Professor of Educational Studies, Oxford University

Mala Rao, Head of Public Health Workforce and Capacity
Health Improvement Directorate
Department of Health.

Mark Petticrew, Associate Director of Medical Research Council,
Social and Public Health Sciences Unit.

Joanna Shapland, Professor of Criminal Justice, Director, The University
of Sheffield Centre for Criminological Research.

David B. Wilson, Associate Professor in the Administration of Justice
Program, Department of Public and International affairs at George
Mason University, USA.

Jonathan Portes, Deputy Director of the Work, Welfare and Poverty
Directorate of the Department for Work and Pensions.

James A. Riccio, Director, LowWage
Workers and Working Communities
Policy Area, MDRC, USA.

Robert Walker, Professor of Social Policy, University of Oxford and Research Fellow, Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Murray Stewart, Visiting Professor, University of the West of England.

Nick Macpherson, Permanent Secretary, HM Treasury.

Michael Noble, Professor of Social Policy, University of Oxford.

Philip Davies, Deputy Director of the Government Social Research Unit, HM Treasury

Keynote speakers Biographies

Richard Bartholomew:  Children, Young Peoples and Families Directorate, Department for Education and Skills

Chief Research Officer for the Department for Education and Skills, responsible for representing its wider research interests.  Richard leads on providing analysis and research  for the Every Child Matters programme, ensuring there is a coherent approach to the collection, analysis and use of data and other evidence across the programme. This includes research and evaluation on early years, parenting, vulnerable children and young people.   Richard has worked as a researcher for the former Manpower Services Commission and the Department of Employment and also worked on the Next Steps initiative in Cabinet Office, setting up executive agencies across government. 

Jon Bright, Head of Implementation Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.  Prior to taking up his current post in January 2000, Jon had been Deputy Director at the Social Exclusion Unit in the Cabinet Office since 1997 where he was responsible for the Unit's work on Neighbourhood Renewal.  Before working for the Government, he was Director of Field Operations at Crime Concern from 1990-1997.  In 1990/91, he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship to study in the United States and is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Criminology. His book 'Turning the Tide: Crime, Community and Prevention' was published by Demos in 1997.

Mark Petticrew is Associate Director of the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow, where he heads a programme on evaluation, which is funded by the Scottish Executive Department of Health. It involves primary research on the health effects of housing, urban regeneration, transport and employment interventions. He is also working with colleagues on systematic reviews of the effects on health and health inequalities of employment, housing, transport and tobacco control policies.

Jonathan Portes began his civil service career working on social security issues in the Treasury.  He subsequently worked in a number of other policy areas in the Treasury, and served as Speechwriter to the Chancellor.  Elsewhere in government, he worked in the Performance and Innovation Unit in the Cabinet Office, where he led projects on long-term strategic challenges and on migration policy.  Outside the civil service, he has worked in an economic consulting firm in New York, for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, and as an independent consultant specialising in development policy.  He joined DWP in 2002, and is Director for Children and Poverty Directorate.   He is also the Chief Economist for Work in the department.

Professor Joanna Shapland

Professor Joanna Shapland is Professor of Criminal Justice in the School of Law, University of Sheffield and Director of the University of Sheffield Centre for Criminological Research.  She is currently the grant holder for two major research grants from the ESRC and the Home Office on desistance from crime and on evaluating restorative justice initiatives with adult offenders, respectively.  She is the UK representative on the governing council of GERN (the main criminology and criminal justice European research network) and Executive Editor of the International Review of Victimology.  She has been a consultant to the United Nations and the Council of Europe on criminal justice matters, as well as advising several UK government departments.

Judy Sebba is Professor of Education at the Sussex Institute where she leads the teaching, learning and assessment research. She is a member of the Assessment Reform Group, the ‘Eppi’ systematic review group on assessment and the Research Assessment Exercise panel for education. Previously, she was Senior Adviser (Research), Standards and Effectiveness Unit, DfES where she was responsible for developing the research strategy and quality of research, including the development of systematic reviewing.  Prior to that she was a researcher and lecturer at the universities of Cambridge and Manchester on special educational needs, inclusion and school improvement.

David B. Wilson, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Administration of Justice Program in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University.  His research interests are the effectiveness of offender rehabilitation and crime prevention efforts, program evaluation methodology, meta-analysis, and systematic reviews.  His researched has focused on a broad range of topics, including the effectiveness of juvenile delinquency interventions, school-based prevention programs, correctional boot-camps, court-mandated batterer intervention programs, and drug-courts; the effects of sugar on children's behaviour; and the effects of alcohol on violent behaviour.  He is an associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Criminology and editor of Campbell Collaboration reviews completed for the Crime and Justice Group.

Professor Peter Tymms is Director of the CEM Centre at Durham University. He started work as a teacher in Central Africa with a degree in natural sciences and later moved to an academic career. His main research interests include monitoring, assessment and research methodology. He devised the PIPS project, which is designed to monitor the affective and cognitive progress of children through primary schools starting with a computer adaptive on-entry baseline assessment. As Director of the CEM Centre, he is responsible for projects monitoring the progress and attitudes of pupils in thousands of schools across the UK and beyond. The CEM Centre is the largest educational research group in a UK university with a staff of 70.

Professor Mala Rao is currently the Head of Public Health Workforce and Capacity at the Department of Health.  She was previously a Director of Public Health for many years. Throughout her career, Mala has been committed to developing multidisciplinary public health and bringing public health teaching, research and practice closer together.

One of her major ‘practice’ achievements was to establish the first cancer network in England. During her time as a DPH her contributions to national policy relevant local research have ranged from the trial of the accelerated childhood immunisation schedule to drawing national attention to higher mortality rates in army babies and instigating multisectoral family support to young army families long before the health impact of social inequalities were publicly acknowledged.She was a member of the Committee of Inquiry into Radiation in MRC supported research in the 1950s and 1960s and the Wellcome Public Health Sciences working group which published ‘Public Health Sciences – Challenges and Opportunities’ in 2004.She was Joint Chair with the Chief Pharmaceutical Officer, of the Choosing Health through Pharmacy strategy published in April 2005. She chaired the project jointly commissioned with the Welsh Assembly, to strengthen the health promotion workforce in the NHS. The project report, Shaping the Future of Public Health: Promoting Health in the NHS was published in July 2005.She has contributed for many years to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, her closest connections being with Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin and Essex University. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Work Based Learning in Primary Care. 

Professor Sir Michael Rutter is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, London.   He has been a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital since 1966, and was Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry from 1973 to 1998.   He set up the Medical Research Council Child Psychiatry Research Unit in 1984 and the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre 10 years later, being honorary director of both until October 1998.   His research has included the genetics of autism, study of both school and family influences on children’s behaviour; he also has a special interest in the interplay between genetic and psychosocial risk factors.  He has led a major study into the effect of early severe deprivation on Romanian orphans adopted into Britain; this is now entering a third phase in which the subjects are followed up at age 15.  He was Deputy Chairman of the Wellcome Trust from 1999 to 2004.  He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987 and was a Founding Fellow of the Academia Europaea and the Academy of Medical Sciences, of which he is currently Clinical Vice-President. He has received numerous international honours and has published some 40 books and over 400 scientific papers and chapters.

Terezinha Nunes, Professor of Educational Studies, Oxford University.

Terezinha is Professor of Educational Studies in the Department of Educational Studies, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford.  She worked as a clinical psychologist in Brazil and later was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to do her PhD in City University of New York.  On returning to Brazil, she carried out her well-known research on “street mathematics”, which established the existence and the educational importance of children’s and adults’ informal mathematical knowledge.  Her current research spans the domains of children’s literacy and numeracy, including hearing and deaf children’s learning. Her focus of analysis covers both cognitive and cultural issues, with a particular interest in educational applications. Recently she directed a large ESRC-TLRP research project that focused on making children’s implicit knowledge in numeracy and literacy explicit, so that it can be used to improve learning in school. She has been awarded a prize for her monograph on “Literacy and Poverty” by the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science and a British Academy Research Readership.

Dr. James A. Riccio is Director of the Low-Wage Workers and Communities policy area for MDRC, a New York-based not-for-profit social policy research firm.  He specializes in the study of work-related programmes and policies for welfare recipients, public housing residents, and other low-wage workers and disadvantaged groups.  Dr. Riccio recently directed a nine-year quasi-experimental evaluation of an employment initiative in public housing (Jobs-Plus).  He is currently heading two large-scale random assignment evaluations of employment retention and advancement programmes—one for low-wage workers in the U.S. (the Work Advancement and Support Center, or WASC, demonstration project) and one for New Deal participants and Working Tax Credit lone parents in Britain (the Employment Retention and Advancement, or UK ERA, demonstration project).  The latter evaluation is being conducted for the Department for Work and Pensions by MDRC in partnership with the Policy Studies Institute, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and the Office for National Statistics.  Dr. Riccio is also helping to design and implement an MDRC evaluation of the MacArthur Foundation’s New Communities Program, which aims to improve residents’ opportunities and quality of life in a mix of poor neighbourhoods in Chicago.  In 1996, Mr. Riccio conducted research on welfare reform in Britain as a recipient of an Atlantic Fellowship in Public Policy.  He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.

Murray Stewart has been engaged in the national evaluations of Local Strategic Partnerships, New Deal for Communities, Single Local Management Centres, and Local Area Agreements.  He led the research on Collaboration and Co-ordination of Area-based Initiatives and prepared the 2003-04 and 2004-05 Mainstreaming reports for the NDC national evaluation.  He is currently Acting Director of Knowledge West.
He has been Board member of the Bristol Regeneration Partnership, Deputy Chairman the Lloyds/TSB Foundation for England and Wales.  He is currently a Trustee of Quartet, Chairman of the North Somerset Fair Shares Local Panel, and Chairman of the Bridge Foundation for Psychotherapy and the Arts. 

Michael Noble is a Professor of Social Policy at the University of and is Director of two research centres - the Social Disadvantage Research Centre and the Centre for Analysis of South African Social Policy. His major research interests are in the areas of poverty and social exclusion, and income maintenance policy. He is involved in a number of projects for the UK Government on small area measurement of multiple deprivation and the evaluation of area based initiatives such as the New Deal for Communities and the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal. He is also working with the South African government on a range of projects including measuring take-up of social security benefits, developing indicators of poverty and social exclusion and producing indices of multiple deprivation.

Robert Walker joined the Department as Professor of Social Policy in April 2006 when he also became a Fellow of Green College. He was formerly Professor of Social Policy at the University of Nottingham and before that Professor of Social Policy Research, Loughborough University where he was Director of the Centre for Research in Social Policy. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a Research Affiliate of the National Poverty Center, University of Michigan and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is a Member of the statutory UK Social Security Advisory Committee and Chair of the Academic Steering Committee of the ESRC British Household Panel Survey.

He is keen that high quality research should be used to inform the political process and to improve policy with the goal of enhancing all our lives. To this end, he undertakes research relevant to the development of welfare policies in Britain and other societies, and engages in dialogue with policy makers and anyone else wanting to use or support research to bring about positive change. Particular research interests include poverty, social exclusion, family dynamics and budgeting strategies, children's aspirations and employment instability and progression. Policy concerns embrace social security and social assistance, welfare to work and labour market policies, policy evaluation and policy transfer - that is the process of learning from experiences in other jurisdictions. He has published 18 books.

Philip Davies is currently Deputy Director of the Government Social Researcher Unit in HM Treasury. Philip is a graduate of the universities of London, Oxford and California. 

Previously he was Director of Social Sciences in the Department for Continuing Education at Oxford University and a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford.  Philip was responsible (with colleagues in the University of Oxford Medical School) for developing the University of Oxford Master's Programme in Evidence-Based Health Care.  He has held a number of teaching and research positions in American and British universities.

Philip is a founder member of the Campbell Collaboration and is on its international steering committee. He has also been a Visiting Honorary Fellow of the UK Cochrane Centre.  He has published extensively in the areas of health sciences, evidence-based health care, education and policy evaluation.