My Policy Internship: A Lesson in Range
Louise Couceiro is a third-year PhD researcher at the School of Education. With a strong interest in gender theory, children’s education and literature, her project explores how children engage with collective biographies about women. Louise recently undertook a three-month UKRI policy internship with the UK government’s Department for Education and reflects on her experience in this blog post.
During my recent internship at the UK government’s Department for Education (DfE), I was devouring David Epstein’s (2019) book, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Not only did Range provide a welcome hiatus from my usual PhD reading, but I found that Epstein’s central argument resonated strongly with what I was observing at DfE. According to Epstein, in most fields, thinking broadly and embracing diversity (having ‘range’) is vital for success. He writes:
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization”
It is true – the world demands specialization from an early age. At fourteen, UK students are asked to select their GCSE subjects which, if they choose to continue in full-time education, has ramifications for their further qualification options such as specialist apprenticeships or subject-specific courses at A Level and University. As PGRs, we know all too well that the world of doctoral degrees demands hyperfocus on a set of key research question. As a result, PhD candidates spend years developing knowledge and honing skills in a very specific and highly focused area of research. This was one of my motivations for applying for a UKRI policy internship; to gain greater perspective and to broaden my field of vision.
During my three months at the department’s Behavioural Insights Unit, I worked on the Futures Insight Programme. The project was innovative and creative, and incredibly wide-ranging in focus. Drawing on insights from a variety of experts, the programme identified future opportunities and challenges facing education and the care system to create a strategic roadmap for long-term policy development. The team was brimming with intellectual and experiential diversity. I was witnessing, first-hand, the value of range: range of knowledge, range of perspective, and range of skill.
Throughout the course of the internship, I planned and facilitated creative focus group sessions with parents and pupils, worked on assessments to ensure issues pertaining to equality were being considered, contributed to various bits of data analysis and undertook desk-based research on users’ perspectives. Whilst I had autonomy when working on these different strands of work, I was consistently encouraged to seek advice and input from others. The value of considering phenomena from a range of perspectives was salient across the project, and this culture of collaboration and heterogeneity undoubtedly strengthened the work.
I experienced the value of range most palpably when participating in an impact mapping workshop with seven other team members. Having already identified what type of things will likely impact the future of education and the care system, such as changing work patterns for parents, the next step was to evaluate the relative impact of these things on one another. Identifying which things were likely to have the most significant impact enabled us to more effectively target interventions for policy making. We considered, for example, how increasing automation could impact changes in the labour market and what this might mean for education. Of course, the perspectives of technologists and economists was helpful here, yet the input offered by sociologists was equally as valuable. Without them, our consideration of the implications for certain groups would have been lacking.
Epstein writes that people are often “digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there” (p. 13). During my internship I learnt that clambering into other trenches – where I often felt disorientated and out-of-my-depth – was a valuable exercise. Since, I have been trying to embrace range in my personal life, whether that’s listening to a podcast that I would ordinarily skip, or purposefully seeking perspectives on issues that are different to my own. In my PhD work, I am trying to imagine myself in other disciplinary shoes more often. When facing a complex question, I try ask myself how a historian, or a psychologist, or an economist, might approach it. For me, being an expert in lots of disciplines is neither possible nor necessary, but considering problems from a range of perspectives helps me to identify what my specialist knowledge offers and where it might need further reinforcement or reframing. This is an important skill to have, especially given that working across disciplinary boundaries is increasingly seen as indispensable for effective problem solving.
I learnt a huge amount during my three months at DfE. I met some exceptionally committed and passionate people, honed my skills in a number of different areas and gained insight into the complex and nuanced nature of policy development. Most importantly, I learnt a valuable lesson in range. If you have the opportunity to apply for a policy internship during your PhD, I’d wholeheartedly recommend it. You never know what you might find in that next trench over.
