Economic Adviser

at  Welsh Assembly Government Communication Centre Home

ID 1912
The Welsh Government operates name-free recruitment. The recruiting panel will not see personal information such as a candidate’s name and address during the sifting process. This policy is in line with our commitment to end bias and promote equality and diversity.

The Social Justice, Early Years and Education role covers a wide range of topics and offers an exciting opportunity to support policies including tackling poverty, childcare provision, and . Examples of priorities in this area include:

• Providing economic advice on universal and targeted approaches across a range of policy interventions to reduce or alleviate poverty.
• Understanding how cross cutting policies can reduce poverty and facilitate economic activity and inclusive growth.
• Providing distributional analysis of the interventions Welsh Government funds to understand who they support.
• Developing economic evaluations of early years and childcare programmes, including Flying Start and the Childcare Offer for Wales.
• Understanding the links between socio-economic background, educational attainment and longer-term economic outcomes.
• Assessing the economic impact of reducing the equity gap in education and attainment

The Education role offers an exciting opportunity to set the direction on economic analysis and support across a wide range of topics supporting education policies. Examples of priorities in this area include:

• Strengthening the evidence base in relation to education economic analysis.
• Developing economic evaluations of education policies, programmes and funding streams.
• Reviewing and scrutinising education infrastructure business cases including those currently considered by the Education Investment Panel.
• Assessing return on investment for programmes like Pupil Development Grant.
• Identifying what works in the transition between Education, Employment and Training.
• Assessment of universal primary free school meals and Additional Learning Need (ALN) reform interventions

Core responsibilities will include:

• Providing economic advice, support and briefings to policy colleagues, raising the awareness and knowledge of appraisal and evaluation techniques, and ensuring analytical rigour in the development of strategy, policy and interventions.
• Promoting the effective use of economic analysis and evidence in policy development and delivery.
• Leading and / or contributing to the drafting of documents, including Ministerial submissions, briefings, impact assessments, consultations, guidance material, papers and other written material as required. Provide responses to Ministerial correspondence and other government business for clearance by a more senior manager.
• Providing answers to Welsh Government questions and contribute to Ministerial and Committee briefings on relevant economic issues.
• Improving the evidence base for relevant policy and delivery by undertaking and communicating analysis/ economic data and designing, commissioning and managing strategic research and evaluation studies.
• Keeping under review relevant research, reports and policy papers to develop an evolving evidence base that helps justify the need for particular interventions, provides appropriate benchmarks, and identify good practice.
• Contributing to quality/improvement activities within own job, and corporately through the wider GES network.
• Contributing to the drafting and delivery of the analytical sections of papers and reports, and supporting the wider evidence and analysis activities of the team, including the effective communication, briefing and dissemination of emerging analysis.
• Building effective working relationships with relevant UK Government departments, other devolved governments, internal and external experts and stakeholders as required to support the analysis