What Have We Learnt?
Our conference Public Services in the 2010s: Prosperity, Austerity and Recovery was held on Friday 11th December, at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London. The event drew on what we’ve learned from the Programme’s nearly 50 research projects and over 100 conferences and workshops, and there was a lively discussion as to how this knowledge can be applied to the challenges of managing public service performance in the 2010s.
Ian Diamond (Chief Executive of the ESRC) opened the conference with a talk on the overall achievements of the Programme. He said that the Public Services Programme was planned to be ‘a major programme that really does have an impact’ and confirmed that ‘it has done everything (and more) that we in the ESRC hoped it would’. The projects, he said, had attained the dual goals of academic excellence and non-academic impact, and throughout the life of the programme, engagement of practioners, policy makers and civil servants with Programme research had been at the centre of the Programme’s concerns.
Keynote contributions were given by Sir Gus O’Donnell (UK Cabinet Secretary) and Martin Weale (Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research). Over 20 other speakers and session chairs gave thought-provoking insights into the implications of the Programme’s research.
Posters outlining the findings of every project can be found in the Library Section of this website, and a photo gallery can be found under Past Events.
