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UKES Council 2013

All UKES business is managed by the Council. This consists of five Officers (President, Vice President, Immediate Past President, Secretary, Treasurer) and at least ten ordinary members elected by the members of the Society at the Annual General Meeting. The AGM is held at the Annual Conference.

Election of Council Members and Officer bearers is by a simple majority vote in a secret ballot of the individual and corporate members of the Society. Members may cast their vote either at the Annual General Meeting or by postal ballot. Candidates for the Council must be nominated by at least two members of the Society. Nominations must reach the Secretary not less than 21 days before the Annual General Meeting.

The Council meets five times a year in January, March, May, July, September and November.

Officers

Council members

Co-opted members

Biographies

• 

  Colin Jacobs

  President

  Colin is head of the Governance and Society team at the British Council.

  He regularly evaluates programmes in leadership, public policy and justice in UK and overseas. Colin has published in professional journals, lectured at Manchester University and he is a Fellow of the CIPD. He has been a UKES Council member for 6 years and lead the international development strand; edited the Evaluator; and most recently, organised and led a highly successful workshop on development and evaluation with DFID. He would like to see UKES become a more influential and popular forum for members to access and enjoy cutting edge knowledge. We could be more widely recognised as the gateway to access courses in evaluation, guide commissioning and accreditation. We must aim to double membership by 2015. We can do this by attracting evaluators from other sectors – health, economics, environment, police, etc and running workshops, seminars, master classes and webinars as well as the annual conference. Corporates and foundations are being invited to run themed events and joint publications should be encouraged. Our regional networks can be strengthened by offering speakers and linking them to professionals in other parts of the UK and abroad. As Vice President Colin wants to involve as many as possible in developing and promoting UKES. He would like all Council members to engage in a concerted effort and enjoy our complementary skills and backgrounds. We can together raise the profile of UKES and make it a “go to” place for existing and new members.

• 

  Elizabeth Robin

  Vice President

  Elizabeth Robin is Head of Profession for Evaluation in DFID.

  Elizabeth Robin is Head of Evaluation Capacity and Quality Group in the Department for International Development (DFID). The Group has a remit to set the standards for evaluation in DFID; provide support processes, guidance and training for staff to achieve those standards; and quality assure evaluation products. The Group also works to develop evaluation capacity in partner countries and Elizabeth is a member of the Board of the CLEAR Initiative, a multi-donor trust fund for developing regional centres of excellence in evaluation and results. Recently, she has been involved in refreshing DFID’s Evaluation Policy to reflect the embedding evaluation agenda in the Department following the establishment of the Independent Commission for Aid Impact in May 2011. Elizabeth is also Head of Profession (HoP) for Evaluation in DFID. As HoP, she manages the professional development of around 140 DFID staff who are accredited as evaluation specialists and also organises the annual accreditation process based on DFID’s evaluation technical competency framework. Elizabeth is a senior statistics adviser and has been with DFID (and its predecessor) for over 20 years. She has experience of collating and reporting information on DFID’s activities for a variety of audiences in the UK and internationally. She has actively promoted the need for robust evidence as a basis for decision-making and her current role allows her to develop the capacity of both DFID and partner staff to do more and better evaluation work in the field of international development.

• 

  Derek Poate

  Past President

  Derek Poate has a background in the evaluation of international development.

  His emphasis has been on projects in the natural resources and rural sectors and evaluations of large institutions. Derek has recently retired as a Director at ITAD where he was a co-founder of the company in 1984. ITAD has grown to be a prominent UK consultancy company with a solid track record of challenging assignments and a reputation for good quality work. Derek’s most notable assignments have been leading the Independent External Evaluation of IFAD in 2005 and both external evaluations of UNAIDS, firstly in 2002 and then 2009. More recent assignments include work in the context of environment and climate change for IUCN, the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation. Derek has extensive experience of the evaluation policies and approaches of the UK’s Department for International Development, other European bilateral donors, UN agencies, and international financial institutions. His geographical experience spans all the major continents. For many years he was an active trainer on monitoring and evaluation courses held at the University of East Anglia and Wye College, London University. He was appointed an Honorary Research fellow at Wye College and later at the Huxley School of Environment, Earth Sciences and Engineering, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. His involvement with UKES is fairly recent but he has already contributed to a workshop on international development evaluation (with Colin Jacobs) and being retired has the time to participate more fully.

• 

  Kelly Beaver

  Secretary

  Kelly Beaver is a Director and Head of Evaluation in the Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute.

  She was previously Head of UK and International Development Evaluation at The Evaluation Partnership Ltd (subsequently Coffey International Development) and prior to this she specialised in evaluation at PricewaterhouseCoopers within the Research, Strategy and Policy group. Kelly has practised evaluation in UK, European and International markets for a wide range of clients including: UK government departments, agencies and charities, European Commission DGs, European Agencies, international aid donors, International Civil Society Organisations, and private sector organisations. Her primary areas of interest include: economic development, employment and skills, and education policies and programmes.

• 

  George Bramley

  Treasurer

  George is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham on the CLARHC programme.

  Prior to this he was an independent evaluation consultant. George is both an experienced commissioner – including being Head of Evaluation at the Small Business Service - and practitioner as a research director at the NFER. George has undertaken evaluations in the areas of enterprise, innovation and education policy and is currently working in the health sector.

• 

  Bev Bishop

  Council member

  Bev Bishop is Commissioning Editor of the Evaluator.

  Bev has worked in research and evaluation since 2002, firstly for the (then) Department of Education and Skills, then at the Centre for Social Research and Evaluation at the New Zealand Ministry of Social Development. She then moved into the private sector, working for GHK Consulting between 2005 and 2009, before joining the Health and Safety Executive, where she is Head of Unit, Behavioural and Social Science/Human Factors, Ergonomics and Psychology. She is interested in any developments in evaluation methodology that provide a sound evidence base for policy and has a strong research interest in labour market issues.

• 

  Erica Bowen

  Council member

  Dr Erica Bowen is a Senior Lecturer at Coventry University.

  Erica has worked within the field of evaluation since 2000 at which time she embarked upon her doctoral research which evaluated a probation-based domestic violence perpetrator programme. As an academic and practising psychologist, she has embraced both quantitative and qualitative approaches to evaluation and have been most directly influenced by the ‘Comprehensive Evaluation’ model proposed by Rossi and colleagues. Erica's main research area remains domestic violence, and she has completed work commissioned by the Ministry of Justice synthesising literature regarding the effectiveness of existing intervention models. She has also completed work commissioned by Wiltshire Probation Trust to evaluate a non-accredited programme for domestic violence perpetrators. This has recently extended to the design and evaluation of a series of assessment and intervention packages based on an engagement model. Erica is also the principal investigator on an EU Daphne-III funded project to develop, deliver and evaluate a serious game based primary intervention for adolescent dating violence across Europe. She has published widely on issues relating to the evaluation of domestic violence interventions, and is currently editing an invited volume ‘Perspectives on evaluating criminal justice and corrections’ for the ‘Advances in Evaluation’ series published by Emerald.

• 

  Clare Elliott

  Council member

  Clare is currently a senior manager in the Department for Work and Pensions.

  She is responsible for the development and implementation of the Innovation Fund (a pilot social impact investment initiative) having also recently led on Community Budgets and Families with Multiple Problems for the Department. Clare joined the Government Economics Service shortly after graduating from Sheffield University. In the last 25 years, she has held a wide variety of roles in the Civil Service in a mix of different Departments and working on a wide range of policy agendas including employment, skills, enterprise, education and local government. While she has most recently been working in policy and operational environments, her career anchors are in the development of performance management and evaluation systems and in their quality assurance. Clare has designed, commissioned, managed and executed a wide range of research and evaluation projects, using both quantitative and qualitative approaches and have pioneered new approaches e.g. examining the impact of influence and sponsorship. Clare is most proud of her time in the Small Business Service where she established and led the successful Research and Evaluation Unit.

• 

  Alison Girdwood

  Council member

  Alison Girdwood is back up to Elizabeth Robin for attendance at Council meetings if she is unavailable.

  Alison Girdwood is a research and evaluation adviser in DFID, specialising in education. In DFID's Evaluation Department, she helped to manage several joint evaluations, including those of the Paris Declaration, anti-corruption, general budget support and the Global Partnership for Education. She is currently leading on the development of an M&E framework for Research and Evidence Division. Alison has also worked for the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Universities of Bath and Edinburgh, and has acted as Vice-Chair and Chair of two NGOs, one specialising in education and the other in linking community-based groups in Scotland with their counterparts in the developing world.

• 

  Kari Hadjivassiliou

  Council member

  Kari Hadjivassiliou is a Principal Research Fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies.

  Kari joined Institute for Employment Studies in 2009 after working as an evaluator for over 12 years at the Tavistock Institute. This included a two-year secondment as a Project Officer/Evaluator at the European Commission. She is an expert in comparative research and evaluation in the fields of employment and labour markets; welfare policies; human and social capital development; and workforce skills development. Her interest and expertise lie in EU-wide policy, programme and process evaluation with a stakeholder and formative element in these fields. She is currently the City Women’s Network’s Chair of Marketing Committee and the International Alliance for Women’s Co-Director for Europe/Middle East. She has been sitting on the UKES’s Council since 2007 where she has served on various sub-committees, including the Membership Group. In spring 2011, on behalf of the UKES Council, she carried out an international benchmarking exercise whereby UKES was compared to other evaluation societies both in the EU and overseas. The aim was to identify good practice examples and any gaps in the current UKES membership offer, so that the latter can appropriately be enhanced and attract more members. She looks forward to taking this work forward in order to inform the revamped UKES membership offer.

• 

  Dione Hills

  Council member

  Dione Hills joined the Tavistock Institute in 1986 after several years as a senior research officer at the Department of Health.

  She was involved from the start of the Evaluation Review and Development Unit (EDRU) which Eliot Stern established at the Institute in 1992 to stimulate innovation and development in the field of evaluation and was, with other members of EDRU, a member of UKES from its earliest days. Her evaluation work spans the sectors of health, community development, social care and disability, and more recently, transport. In addition to individual evaluation reports, she has published a number of methodological papers, including a guide to evaluation of community based health interventions (NICE website), a paper on the practical methodological implications of assessing ‘public value’ (the Work Foundation website), and a recent guide to ‘Better attribution in transport impact evaluations’ for the Department of Health. Her current interest is in exploring the potential of theory based evaluation in various sectors, teaching self evaluation skills, and exploring web-based evaluation tools that can facilitate evaluation as a shared and participative activity.

• 

  Ulrike Hotopp

  Council member

  Dr Ulrike Hotopp is the Chief Economist and Director for Analysis for DEFRA.

  In this role she will be responsible for DEFRA’s evaluation of policy. Up to now Ulrike has been the Head of the team leading on appraisal and evaluation methodology in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). In this role she joined the evaluation society and participated actively in the UKES conferences by organising a panel discussion about the role of evaluation in policy making and giving a presentation on a key BIS evaluation. Previously Ulrike has been the Chief Economist at the Health and Safety Executive where she shared responsibility for evaluations with the Head of Social Research. One of her main pieces of work in this role was an assessment of the overall impact of the HSE’s activity on the UK economy. From HSE Ulrike moved to DECC where she led the analysis and impact assessment of the Renewable Energy Strategy. Ulrike holds a PhD in Economics from Sussex University, an MA in European Studies from the Central European University and an MA from Sussex. Her first degree is in Economics from the University of Bonn. Her main objective as a member of the UKES council will be to enhance the role of impact evaluation in decision making.

• 

  Andy Parkinson

  Council member

  Andy Parkinson is a Director of Consilium Research and Consultancy.

  Andy is an experienced research and evaluation practitioner with hands on experience of designing and managing a diverse range of formative and summative evaluation studies. His list of previous and current clients includes the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Home Office, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Museums Libraries and Archives Council, Scottish Arts Council, National Literacy Trust, the Department for Communities and Local Government and a wide range of local councils and local partnerships. Andy has experience of a wide range of qualitative and quantitative research methods and is also trained in the use of logic frameworks and social return on investment (SROI) techniques. He has a particular interest in approaches to locality working and neighbourhood management as well as the emerging Big Society agenda.

• 

  Robert Picciotto

  Council member

  Robert (‘Bob’) Picciotto is Visiting Professor at Kings College, London.

  He has contributed to UKES through participation in international development work (with Colin Jacobs); work on evaluation competencies (with Helen Simons) and active involvement in the UKES London Network (led by Joy Beishon). He is a graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (Princeton University) and a member of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is a board member of the European Evaluation Society board and of three advisory panels: World Bank Independent Evaluation Group; Rockefeller Foundation; and Wilton Park - a UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office autonomous body. He has served on the United Kingdom Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact (2006-2010). At the World Bank he held senior management positions including Vice-President, Corporate Planning and Budgeting and Director-General of the Independent Evaluation Group (1992-2002). Since 2002, he has provided independent evaluation advice to the UK Department for International Development, the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Council of Europe Development Bank, the International Fund for Agriculture Development, the United Nations Development Program, the Global Environment Facility, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Sweden’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Swedish Agency for Development Evaluation.

• 

  Stephen Russell

  Council Member

  Stephen is Research Manager at the large Housing Association Midland Heart

  Stephen has worked in Research for over 10 years, specialising primarily in quantitative research, data mining techniques, market information and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Stephen began at Worcestershire County Council working in the Research & Intelligence Unit with a focus in the areas of Housing, Crime and the Economy. High profile projects which Stephen has led on include Crime & Disorder audits across Worcestershire and Shropshire, the review of the West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy and the production of the South Worcester Housing Market Assessment. In 2007 Stephen moved to the large Housing Association Midland Heart as the Research Manager, leading on the development of customer and market intelligence. In recent years Stephen’s work has focussed in on evaluations and measuring impact of interventions. An impact evaluation into Midland Heart’s innovative apprenticeship scheme has been shortlisted for Best Social Return on Investment study and Stephen has just completed a guidance paper for the sector on how to measure and embed social impact.

• 

  Geoff White

  Council member

  Geoff White is a freelance consultant.

  Geoff was a senior economic adviser in the DTI and HM Treasury until 1988 when he became associate director first with Coopers & Lybrand and then with PACEC. He directed the evaluation practice of SQW for fifteen years until late 2010 when he set up his own research and evaluation consultancy. Geoff has carried out evaluations in widely diverse policy areas and for an extensive range of clients in UK central government, the devolved administrations and regional and local government. He has produced synthesis reports – e.g. for BIS and UKTI on evaluation findings with regard to their business support and trade promotion. He also developed evaluation frameworks, training and guidance – e.g. the Impact Evaluation Framework adopted by BERR/BIS and the RDAs to govern the way they carried out evaluations. More recently, Geoff was commissioned by HM Treasury to carry out a major review and edit of the Magenta Book – the official guide on evaluation design and delivery. Geoff was a UKES Council member many years ago and recently rejoined when his freelance status gave him increased flexibility and time. His current interest is in the role that evaluation should play in effective public policy-making for complex problems and in uncertain times. He hopes to contribute to the UKES conference on this theme. Geoff would like to work with UKES colleagues to ensure that policy evaluation retains a high profile and role at a time of budget austerity.