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
