Senior Policy Advisor Open Innovation Team in London

The multi award-winning Open Innovation Team is a cross-government unit housed in DfE that helps colleagues across government develop ambitious policy solutions. We operate like an in-house policy consultancy for government, delivering our projects on a cost-recovery basis. We work across all areas of government policy, including health, growth, policing, justice, foreign policy, digital, AI, media, culture, energy and environment. We help our colleagues to solve problems at all points of the policy cycle, from clearly defining a problem and the rationale for government to intervene, to developing policy options and helping them test and deliver those.

Examples of recent projects we’ve worked on include helping the DfE develop policy options around AI and EdTech in education, researching international comparators for the civil legal aid system for the Ministry of Justice, and assessing the opportunity for the College of Policing to use Virtual Reality to train police officers. In addition to this policy work, we also deliver training and advice to our university partners and work to set up other useful cost-recovery services, including an Evaluation Services Unit that we launched in 2024.

You will spend most of your time leading policy projects. You will task manage a small project team, and you may also line-manage a few junior members of staff. Working within the client’s requirements, you’ll have the freedom to design the project yourself, and be expected to work autonomously, leading your project team to synthesise evidence, draw out key insights and offer practical advice for your clients. Our policy projects vary, but they often include desk research and semi-structured interviews with experts, engagement with stakeholders and service users, developing policy options and prototyping these, or running test and learn experiments to test policy ideas in practice.

You will also identify and scope new policy projects, helping us bring in new business. As part of this, you’ll work on developing new types of products and services, identifying new opportunities for us to add value to our customers or expand into new service lines. You will manage or support the relationship with one of our university partners, and deliver training on government and policymaking, as well as advice to academics in one-to-one sessions.

This role is demanding but rewarding, and very different to a typical policy role. It will appeal to someone who wants to work on interesting and difficult public policy problems, but is also keen to be entrepreneurial and do consultancy-style work. As well as classic policy skills, it requires analytical ability, client management skills, leadership ability and an eye for new business opportunities.

• Essential Criteria
• Delivering policy projects: You have experience designing and delivering consultancy-style policy or research projects.
• Pitching for new business: You have experience initiating conversations about new work, developing proposals, and securing agreement to deliver. This could also include identifying a customer need and developing a new service or product.
• Managing customers: You have experience delivering for a customer in a consultancy-style role.
• Working in a team and contributing to an inclusive culture: You have experience of working collaboratively, including task-managing a small team. You have contributed to making your team or workplace inclusive.
• Delivering training and advice: You have experience delivering training.

Technical skills We’ll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process: Written and Verbal Communication.

Alongside your salary of £58,185, Department for Education contributes £16,856 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.