Research will help shape cross-government writing skills training
Researchers are to carry out a ground-breaking project to assess the impact of writing skills training across government.
Emma Gibbs, Evidence and Impact lead, Government Skills
A team from Government Skills is joining forces with Apolitical to take a holistic approach to evaluating the impact of writing skills courses on the civil servants who complete them.
Assessing skills
“We want to understand how the current training offer effectively develops writing skills. We’ll do this by assessing people’s writing skills before taking part in the training and again afterwards to measure how much and in what ways their skills have improved,” said Emma Gibbs, evidence and impact lead, Government Skills (pictured).
“The results will help us decide if and how we need to change the writing skills training offer so that they achieve the impact we need from them.”
Evaluation project
The overall writing skills offer being evaluated is made up of four courses:
- Foundations of writing in government (JASPER)
- Advance your writing in government
- Advising and Briefing
- Drafting masterclass
Once the initial evaluation work has been completed, Government Skills will be working with Apolitical to produce an evaluation toolkit that departmental learning and development professionals can use to measure the impact of the courses on their own participants.
Giving departments support
“We want to empower learning and development leaders by giving them the tools and support they need to carry out their own evaluations,” said Emma.
“They can use the data they get for their own departmental purposes as well as sharing their insights centrally so that the training can be developed as participants’ needs evolve.”
Teams who have booked or plan to book any of these courses taking place in Spring 2025 and who would like to take part in the pilot evaluation should contact: writingevaluationpilot@apolitical.co