Dawson Mclean Email & Phone Number

Slough, England, United Kingdom

At the non-profit National Foundation for Educational Research, I help to deliver cutting edge quantitative research supporting the education sector in England. I lead projects, primarily concerning teacher workforce challenges, which use educational microdata and sophisticated statistical techniques to derive valuable, policy-oriented insights. I have experience and well-developed technical skills in working with large, administrative datasets. This includes submitting applications for controlled data, writing efficient and readable code to clean data, setting up reproducible analysis pipelines and data visualisation. I am also skilled in using statistical techniques in a policy evaluation context. I attended a multi-day course through the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice on policy evaluation techniques (randomised controlled trials and quasi-experimental research designs) and have given internal presentations on the use of difference-in-difference models. I have also received training on effective writing skills to help communicate technical material to non-technical audiences.Working at a non-profit research organisation, I have also gained experience writing project proposals for research funding. This is alongside other project management skills integral to delivering a research project, such as timescale planning, risk and budget monitoring and stakeholder engagement. Working in NFER's Classroom and Workforce team, I have become well-versed in the challenges facing the teaching workforce in England. I was the lead author of the 2023 Teacher Labour in England Annual Report, which summarised key trends in teacher recruitment and retention in the wake of the pandemic. I will also be involved in further work throughout 2023 researching what policy proposals are likely to lead to improvements in teacher supply in the most cost effective way. Other selected publications which I have written or contributed to can be found attached to my profile.

Gatineau, Quebec, Canada

Within Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), I was part of the bilingual French and English Labour Market and Skills Research team. My work involved conducting sophisticated statistical analysis within Statistics Canada's Research Data Centre (RDC) to help inform the development of Canadian skills policy. I was heavily involved with a project analysing the wage premium associated with non-cognitive skills (i.e. soft skills) in the Canadian workforce. I was the lead author of a report summarising the main research findings which was published in the American Journal of Management in late 2019. I also presented the main findings at the Société canadienne de science économique conference in Quèbec City and at the Canadian Economics Association conference in Banff. Other projects involved research into the typical trajectories students follow through post-secondary education in Canada and attending Statistics Canada focus groups to develop survey instruments quantifying the prevalence of gig working within the Canadian workforce.

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

During my Master's internship I worked in the Ministry of Education for the Government of British Columbia. I primarily helped the ministry derive value from its significant but under-utilised administrative education microdata assets. My work involved writing complex SQL queries to aggregate historic student demographic and academic data into a large relational table for further linking with administrative tax records for research purposes. My other work in this role involved using administrative data to analyse the key determinants and drivers of educational success in the province, to help inform policy development. I helped build statistical regression models that investigated the role played by demographic and educational characteristics in determining student attainment and the likelihood of on-time graduation. The results led to preliminary estimates of schools' value-add, helping policymakers to better understand the drivers of educational success and simulate the effect of policy changes.

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Research assistant in the fisheries economics research unit. I worked to enhance the global commercial fishing cost database by seeking out new sources of economic data on commercial fishing fleets for countries around the world, and compiling into a relational database.

Master Of Arts - Ma, Economics

Bachelor’S Degree, Economics

Activities and Societies: UBC Concert Winds, Research assistant at UBC Fisheries Center