Developing a Lifetime Wellbeing Ready Reckoner economic appraisal toolkit: a feasibility study

The Department for Education is looking for a supplier to lead a feasibility study, to support plans to expand our economic appraisal capability.

Our aspiration is to develop an appraisal toolkit for the education and children's services sectors, which centres on wellbeing outcomes, throughout the life course. In education and children's services, quantifiable economic appraisals typically focus on labour market outcomes, such as lifetime earnings. These do not capture important effects on non-market outcomes, which capture the wider social value of our investments.

Our working title for this toolkit is the Lifetime Wellbeing Ready Reckoner (LWRR).

The concept of "Lifetime Wellbeing" builds on the HM Treasury (2021) Wellbeing Guidance for Appraisal. We wish to explore methods to appraise and evaluate the long-run wellbeing effects of policy interventions with children.

"Ready Reckoner" conveys that the model ought to be generalisable. It would be designed to provide first approximations for these wellbeing policy effects, across a wide range of policy interventions, during childhood. This contrasts with bespoke modelling, designed to evaluate a single or narrow set of policy interventions, in more detail and potentially with greater accuracy.

Lifetime effects typically cannot be observed in such policy evaluations, and so the appraisal tool would need to simulate these long run effects, based on secondary sources of evidence, primarily using UK longitudinal surveys.

Additional information: This opportunity will be conducted under the Crown Commercial Service's RM6126 Research & Insights DPS. You must be registered as a supplier on RM6126 Research & Insights DPS to have the opportunity to be selected to receive the Bid Pack / invitation to tender for this competition.

The feasibility study will consider:

 The relevant published literature and existing internal DfE appraisal models.  The best way to construct summative measures of wellbeing, to quantify and monetise policy effects. These are likely to include wellbeing-adjusted life years (WELLBYs), aligned to the Green Book wellbeing appraisal guidance.  However, WELLBYs are primarily intended to capture adult life satisfaction - a key element of the feasibility study is to explore equivalent summary measures of wellbeing and/or emotional health during childhood. We notionally describe this concept as C-WELLBY as it would capture the inherent value of wellbeing in childhood in appraisal, arguably for the first time. However, we recognise that it may differ in its construction from WELLBYs.  Detailed exploration of the best available data and methods to develop a policy micro-simulation, 'under the bonnet' of this appraisal tool.  Practical considerations around the subsequent design, delivery, and use of this model. For example, the feasibility study would address the following questions: • What is a minimum viable product that might be considered sufficiently robust to support Green and Magenta Book value for money policy analysis? • What is the optimum product, balancing user requirements, model quality, with other considerations such as financial affordability and deliverability within a given timeframe? • Could the model be made available inside and outside the Department, supporting appraisal across the education and children's sectors, whilst balancing the need for appropriate use of the toolkit? • What level of skills, expertise, resource, and financial costs would typically be required to use, develop and maintain the toolkit? • Given the novelty and complexity of the model, how scarce are these expert skills? To what extent might this act as a constraint on the ability to deliver a viable and economically credible toolkit?