PolicyWISE Delivers a Year of Growth and Cross-Nation Impact

PolicyWISE has completed a landmark year of activity, strengthening its role as a leading source of comparative insight and cross-nation collaboration across the UK and Ireland. The Year Three Report highlights a period of significant progress, expanding partnerships, and growing influence—offering readers a clear picture of how PolicyWISE is helping to shape a more connected, evidence-informed policymaking landscape.

Across 2024–25, the initiative delivered an extensive programme of research, training, and engagement. The Wise in 5 series continued to provide concise, accessible briefings on key policy themes including palliative care, Housing First, voting age reform, geodiversity, and language support for refugees and migrants. These briefings have been referenced in national blogs, our work mentioned in news articles and hosted on global platforms like UNESCO.

The report also captures PolicyWISE’s growing impact in convening learning across jurisdictions. This year’s four-nation roundtable series brought together senior officials and sector leaders in Manchester, Belfast, Edinburgh, and Cardiff, creating trusted spaces for open dialogue on shared challenges. Feedback reflects the importance of these sessions in strengthening understanding of multi-level governance and building lasting relationships.

Training and capability-building remained central to PolicyWISE’s mission, with more than 650 participants taking part in sessions on devolution, evidence use, and comparative policymaking. The report outlines how these activities—alongside the development of the first PolicyWISE online course—are expanding the initiative’s reach and supporting both researchers and practitioners.

The Year Three Report offers an engaging, accessible overview of all this work, and we encourage readers to explore it in full to understand the growing contribution PolicyWISE is making across the nations.