Emily Tanner Email & Phone Number

Across my career, I have been committed to improving social well-being, primarily through research into education and inequalities associated with disadvantage. Reflecting the adage in the career sector ‘you cannot be what you cannot see’, I started out as a social worker. Having grown up in foster care from infancy until nearly 9, and then living and caring for my mother who had multiple mental disorders, I was drawn to the social policy and sociological aspects of my Cambridge History degree and then, after a couple of years of work experience, studied for a Masters in Applied Social Studies and the Diploma in Social Work. After working in various social work roles with adults with learning disabilities, women experiencing domestic violence and elder care, I moved into research, first at Yale University, working with Matia Finn Stevenson at the Zigler Centre for Social Policy and then studying for a DPhil at Nuffield College and the Department for Social Policy at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Teresa Smith, alongside research associate work. For 13 years, I was at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), the largest independent social research agency in the UK, delivering research for government, research funders and third sector clients. From 2014 to 2018, I led the 20-strong Children, Families & Work team spanning education and employment policy research with a strong focus on business growth and communicating evidence to achieve change. I was Head of Research at The Careers and Enterprise Company from 2018 to 2022, leading on research and evaluation to find out how young people can best be inspired and prepared for the world of work. I developed the Future Skills Questionnaire, a self-reported measure of career readiness for young people embedded in the Compass+ digital careers management tool used by 30,000 students in the first year, and supported the development of other impact measurement tools for careers leaders and employers. I helped establish the Hubs Innovation Projects to test and evaluate interventions, developing the evaluation approach used across 18 projects. As Programme Head at the Nuffield Foundation since October 2022, I develop and manage a portfolio of grants covering post-14 education and skills. Within the portfolio, I manage Skills Imperative 2035, a strategic programme grant investigating how demand and supply of essential employment skills is likely to change over the next 15 years and how these skills can be developed through the education system.

Listed skills include Quantitative Research, Survey Design, Research Design, Proposal Writing, and 11 others.