Nottingham’s contribution to CAPE

Reflecting on the five years of CAPE initiatives at the University of Nottingham, lead by the Institute for Policy and Engagement

Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement (CAPE) was a knowledge exchange and research project, funded by Research England, that explored how to support effective and sustained engagement between academics and policy professionals across the higher education sector.

CAPE was a partnership between University College London and the universities of Cambridge, Manchester, Northumbria and Nottingham.

CAPE logo
CAPE has grown understanding of how to connect research and policy, and our role in it shows how we are seen as a leading light in this area.
Stephen Meek, Director of the Institute of Policy and Engagement

Timeline of when we started

Set up in 2019, the CAPE programme has had many impacts on the development of academic-policy engagement projects, capabilities, and infrastructure at the University of Nottingham. This impact can be measured against three key areas: fellowships, training and seed funding.

Fellowships

Fellowships are a partnership between two or more groups or individuals who come together to pursue a shared interest or aim. The CAPE Policy Fellowships have helped to build and strengthen partnerships between researchers and policy professionals.

Laura Koch undertook a fellowship at the University of Nottingham that aimed to support the development of local digital skills. Based in the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Laura’s fellowship brought together a network of private, public, and third sector actors to deliver a sustainable digital skills project. You can read more about Laura’s work here.

We also piloted a fellowship scheme that placed academics within charities, working on policy-facing projects. These supported the needs of the host organisation in accessing expertise, while allowing academics to develop skills and experience in an organisation outside of their usual setting.

CAPE funded four charity fellowships with Nottingham:

  • Tara Webster-Deakin collaborated with Nottinghamshire YMCA to assess whether Developmental Assets can be applied in a UK context to maximise outcomes for young people.
  • Tim Hutchings carried out a charity fellowship with the Religious Education Council.
  • Tessa Langley worked with ASH to run a roundtable meeting attended by 20 stakeholders from academies, charities, DHSC, and think tanks to discuss taking a more harmonised approach to estimating the costs of tobacco, alcohol, and obesity.
  • Zinnia Gonzalez-Carranza’s fellowship with Etico and Social Business Network produced an infographic and policy paper on the importance of supporting smallholder cooperatives to stimulate rural social development in South America.
Through the policy paper and infographic, the CAPE project further validates the initiative and supports us to effectively showcase it to a wider audience.
Rachel Wallace, Social Business Network

Training

Through training, CAPE sought to improve the quality, accessibility and agility of research into decision-making.

CAPE funded the first year of The Institute Academy Programmes, our flagship training programme for researchers across the university, offering bespoke support in policy engagement. The programme has since developed and offers two programmes to support policy impact, Policy Impact Pathways Programme (Early Career) and Policy Impact Accelerator Programme (Mid Career). These programmes offer training sessions for up to five cohort members on each programme, as well as funding to carry out a policy impact project in their chosen area.

I enjoyed the workshops. I found the taught content was very useful and provided very practical solutions for engaging in policy work. The discussions around this were very useful
Karen Alvey, previous cohort of Policy Impact Pathways Programme

Another pioneer project that was funded through CAPE and led by Nottingham was the Policy Cards. This interactive tool can be used to aid academics in planning their own policy campaigns. CAPE funded the development of the guidance document that sits alongside the cards and their digitalisation, so the cards can be used for online workshops. Hanne Wagner, who led the project, wrote a case study for CAPE on how the cards work and how they can be used to stimulate policy engagement.

When you start thinking about [policy impact], it’s a really broad topic with a lot of ways to go, so having the cards is really helpful.
Andrea Sartorius, previous cohort of Policy Impact Pathways Programme

The Institute now uses the cards as a training tool in the PIPP and PIAP programmes and is currently exploring a service provision to facilitate workshops more widely across the sector.

Seed funding

The CAPE Challenge Fund awards funding to ‘challenges’ set by policy organisations to which academics could respond. One of these was set out by the Ministry of Justice and was responded to by Nottingham academic, Vicky Kemp. In this case study, Vicky discusses how she used the Challenge Fund to develop a relationship with the Ministry of Justice.

I have found CAPE to be extremely helpful in providing co-production with a policy organisation
Vicky Kemp

The CAPE Collaboration Fund supported projects that have been co-developed by researchers with at least one policy partner to address a specific policy need. From 2020-2024, we supported 20 projects worth over £400k, three of which took place at Nottingham:

Pat Thomson collaborated with the National Association of Head Teachers to improve school leader recruitment and retention. Alex Trautrims’ project, “Leveraging labour market compliance: The case for a Single Enforcement Body”, worked with the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner. Alex discussed the project in this podcast episode.

Conclusion

Overall, CAPE has had many achievements, both locally and nationally as well as igniting relationships built between academics and policy partners that continue to thrive. In addition to activity at Nottingham, CAPE produced a portfolio of training resources, centrally, which can be found on the CAPE website here.

CAPE’s external evaluation report and self-reflective final report due to go live in January, goes into more depth about the learnings for the sector to take forward from exploration of each of the six mechanisms.

For more information on CAPE, visit the CAPE website here

This blog was written by Daisy Forster, CAPE Policy Insights Coordinator.