Council

UKES Council 2010

All UKES business is managed by the UKES 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, November.

Officers

President -Helen Morrell, Jobseekers Analysis Division, Work and Welfare Strategy Directorate, Department for Work and Pensions
Vice President - Saville Kushner, University of the West of England
Past President - Helen Simons, University of Southampton
Secretary -Richard Cotmore, NSPCC
Treasurer - George Bramley

Council members

Bev Bishop, Health and Safety Executive
Miles Burger, East Midlands Development Agency
Kari Hadjivassiliou, Institute for Employment Studies
Colin Jacobs, The British Council
Myra Kandemiri, University of Edinburgh
Kelly Long, The Evaluation Partnership
Roland Marden, Booktrust
Robert Picciotto, King's College London

Co-opted members

Dione Hills, The Tavistock Insitute
Kerstin Junge, The Health Foundation

Helen Morrell
Helen Morrell works as a Strategist in Central Government. She has managed policy evaluations and provided policy advice in a number of Central Government Departments and now works for the Department for Work and Pensions on Labour Market policy. Prior to that she worked for the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research (CRESR) and the University of Sheffield as a researcher.

Richard Cotmore
Richard Cotmore has been a Senior Evaluation Officer with the NSPCC for 6 years. His first job was in evaluation a quarter of a century ago, but he took an interesting and fulfilling detour as a social work practitioner and manager for 18 years before completing the loop. Richard has been a project manager for a series of internal evaluations within the NSPCC focusing on services to children and families (including therapeutic services and specialist assessments) as well as consultancy and campaigning. Richard has been an active member of the UKES London network planning group since 2006 and was network lead during 2007. He has enjoyed the opportunity at UKES events to network with other evaluators and consider the constraints and possibilities of different contexts in addressing common evaluation dilemmas. His current evaluation interests are: participatory methods; evaluating with children and young people; and helplines.

George Bramley
George is a Principal Research Officer in the National Foundation for Educational Research Northern Office. George has experience of being both a commissioner as well as a practitioner having worked in DTI (now BIS) for eleven years prior to joining NFER. George has undertaken evaluations in the areas of enterprise, innovation and education policy. George was involved in setting up the Yorkshire and Humber evaluation network.

Bev Bishop
Bev Bishop is Commissioning Editor of the Evaluator. After her MA from the University of Bradford, Bev spent a fascinating five years teaching English and Social Science in Japan. She returned to the UK to study for a PhD on the impact of globalization on the women working in Japan, which she obtained from the University of Sheffield in 2002. Since then she has been working in research and evaluation, 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. Bev then moved into the private sector, working for GHK Consulting between 2005 and 2009, before joining the Health and Safety Executive, where she is employed as a Principal Research Officer. 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.

Miles Burger
Miles Burger is currently the Evaluation Manager at emda (East Midlands Development Agency). As such he leads on all evaluation-related activity within the agency, as well as sitting on the RDA’s Evaluation Practitioner’s Group (EPG) (which guides national RDA evaluation policy and practice). RDAs have a wide-ranging remit, with activities including: business support provision via Business Link; physical regeneration projects; the promotion of innovation; employment, learning and skills initiatives; sustainable development; international trade and investments; and tourism, culture and the 2012 Games within the region.

Prior to emda, Miles was a Research Analyst at WRAP (the Waste & Resources Action Programme) for two and half years. He was also the lead for BREW-funded activities and sat on Defra’s BREW Metrics steering group. Between 2003 and 2006, Miles was employed as Policy Research Officer for the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL).

Kari Hadjivassiliou
Kari Hadjivassiliou is Principal Research Fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies, working in the Workplace Performance and Skills team with a focus on international employment work. Kari previously worked with the Tavistock Institute. There her projects included a number funded by the European Central Bank and the European Commission, where she spent a two-year secondment. Her interests include workforce diversity, especially relating to age and gender, and she has worked on policy evaluations relating to training, induction and some welfare to work policies such as the New Deal for Young People.

Colin Jacobs
Colin is a senior governance adviser at the British Council with a background in public administration reform. His professional experience includes substantive experience of developing monitoring and evaluation systems in developing and transitional countries. He currently works as a consultant on donor projects to develop senior civil servants and NGO’s in Bangladesh, Sudan, Croatia, and Kosovo. He has a particular interest in Regulatory Impact Assessment and has helped to review the UK Government’s system and to advise the Government of South Africa. Colin is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD). He is also an associate at Manchester University where he serves on the General Council and provides occasional lectures. Colin has published widely on evaluation and public sector reform overseas. Outside of work he is a keen sculptor.

Myra Kandemiri
Myra is a lecturer at Moray House School of Education, University Edinburgh. She is the course leader of a dedicated course in evaluation within the department of Higher and Community Education and also gives occasional lectures on the MSc in E-learning and the Management of Training Development MSc programme. Her professional experience includes several evaluation consultancies working with colleagues from private research companies. She has recently completed the evaluation of a video empowerment project for the Scottish Borders Council and has just begun a project to evaluate the University of Edinburgh’s e-portfolio programme. She is the UKES link person on the Scottish Evaluation Network. When she is not at work Myra is actively involved in faith-based identity and confidence-building work with children between the ages of six and 15 years.

Kelly Long
Kelly Long is a Principal Consultant with The Evaluation Partnership, a niche consultancy practice which specialises in the evaluation of public sector policies, programmes and project in the UK, Europe and more recently at an international level. Kelly has a background in economics and social research methods and has been working in evaluation since 2003. Prior to her role with The Evaluation Partnership she worked as an economic consultant for the Policy, Research and Strategy unit within PricewaterhouseCoopers and prior to this in a similar role for BearingPoint (formerly KPMG consulting). Kelly’s professional experience is primarily in the areas of regional economic development (enterprise / innovation / employment and skills), education and European funding.

Roland Marden
Roland Marden gained a Phd in Political Science at City University of New York in 2001 and taught as a lecturer at University of Sussex 2002-06. He became Research Manager at Booktrust, a leading UK reading charity in 2006. Since then he has conducted and managed evaluation for Booktrust’s bookgifting programmes, most famously, Bookstart. The programme evaluations he manages focus on logistical performance as well as measuring how effective the programmes are in encouraging parents and children to read more frequently. He is part of a European consortium of researchers who share knowledge on evaluating reading programmes. He is currently involved in setting up with external partners a five year longitudinal study of the impact of the Bookstart bookgifting programme.

Robert Picciotto
Robert (‘Bob’) Picciotto is Visiting Professor at Kings College, London. He sits on the board of the European Evaluation Society and serves as a member of the International Advisory Committee on Development Impact which reports to the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State of International Development. Bob’s international development career spans over 40 years. In his last assignment within the World Bank Group, he reported to the Board of Directors as Director-General, Evaluation (1992-2002). He had previously served as Vice President, Corporate Planning and Budgeting (1990-92) and as Director, Projects Department in Asia, Middle East and North Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Dione Hills
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.