We often talk about “digital natives”, but what about evidence natives? In children’s services, many public service and community leaders are exactly that. They’re used to navigating complex systems, drawing on the real-world evidence of experience, science and context to make decisions every day. They might not be experts in every type of evidence (who is?), but their ability to make sense of it all is essential—and worth celebrating.
We hear a lot about the evidence/practice gap, and how long it takes for scientific discoveries to influence the services that we receive. In the world of children’s services it is a loaded phrase, implying that local family support services are insufficiently evidence-based, and that local authorities and their partners are failing to make evidence-based decisions and simply need to do ‘what works’.
The truth is that public service and community leaders are already using evidence in the real world, every day of the week. In the same way as we talk about ‘digital natives’, we should celebrate these local leaders as ‘evidence natives’, constantly balancing different kinds of knowledge about
- lived and learned experience,
- data about populations, systems, and resources in the local context,
- as well as learning from science on implementation, interventions and child development.
They are using this rich evidence picture to make judgements about how best to support families in the moment and in the future.
Tricky, complex, and subtle work, usually done with compromise and collaboration, depending on both professional judgement and the quality of the infrastructure that supports them to apply evidence to their work.
We need to challenge the deficit language of an ‘evidence/practice gap’, and start from where communities and local system leaders are, helping them to balance the different kinds of evidence that matter to the challenges they are facing, and using the rich breadth of evidence in a powerful way.
The robust and painstaking work to build our understanding of the evidence behind specific interventions is important and must go on, but it is only part of the evidence story and we should avoid overemphasising this to the detriment of other forms of evidence, particularly when seeking to answer system questions.
You can view the video (courtesy of Nesta) of Ben Lewing speaking about the evidence/practice gap and evidence natives at the Nesta launch of A New Era for Integration in the Early Years via his LinkedIn page here.