Evaluation Officer - London, United Kingdom - THE CENTRE FOR TRANSFORMING ACCESS AND STUDENT OUT

Description

Job description

The Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes (TASO) work focuses on the generation, synthesis and dissemination of high-quality evidence about effective practice in widening participation and student outcomes.

We primarily focus on developing and disseminating causal evidence.

TASO is an affiliate What Works Centre, and part of the UK Government's What Works Movement. Our vision is to eliminate equality gaps in higher education (HE). Our mission is to improve lives through evidence-informed practice.


The Role

The Evaluation Officer will work on TASO's Research and Evaluation (R&E) programme to develop a better understanding of what works to support widening participation and student success.

Under the guidance of the Evaluation Manager, the Evaluation Officer will help develop a suite of high-quality resources and step-by-step guidance to support universities and colleges to better evaluate the activities and programmes they deliver.

This will include developing evaluation guidance documents, pages for our website, webinars and training materials. The Officer will help deliver training based on these materials to a wide range of external stakeholders.

The Officer may also help commission new projects designed to develop evaluation guidance for practitioners, evaluators and researchers from multiple institutions.

They will work across these projects to manage and monitor progress, collate findings, analyse data and help steer the overall programme of work.

They may also undertake internal research projects themselves, including synthesis of secondary research; conducting qualitative, quantitative and/or survey research.

The role will involve substantial stakeholder management, liaison with various interested parties outside TASO, convening of stakeholder groups and supporting training sessions.

The Evaluation Officer will have strong communication skills and be able to convey their findings, including complex quantitative information and advanced evaluation methods (particularly causal impact evaluation methods), clearly and will support TASO to influence broader policy discussion.

They will work both independently and—on more complex tasks—under supervision.

Among other responsibilities, the role will include:

• Helping develop a suite of high-quality guidance to support universities and colleges to better evaluate the activities and programmes they deliver.
• Using these resources and materials to deliver training inperson and online to a wide range of external stakeholders.
• Helping develop theories of change and evaluation plans for individual interventions and multiintervention programmes.
• Conducting deskbased research, reviewing existing literature to synthesise the quality of evidence on a given topic and collate examples of sector good practice.
• Providing support to the Evaluation Manager in the commissioning of external research and evaluation.
• Overseeing funded projects, ensuring delivery to timelines, value for money for TASO, and timely and proactive risk assessment and mitigation.
• Helping design, run and analyse the results of research projects in collaboration with multiple external organisations. This may include qualitative and quantitative research.
• Contributing to the administration and secretariat for a number of advisory panels formed of external stakeholders.
• Working with the Evaluation Manager to develop TASO's relationships with key stakeholders in the HE sector.
• Develop/maintain knowledge of cuttingedge research and evaluation which is relevant to TASO's work. Use this knowledge to contribute to the delivery of blog posts, literature reviews and research briefings, working with the Evaluation Manager.
• Contributing to the delivery of external training courses and events to disseminate the work of TASO's wider research programme.

For the full job and person specification please visit our website