We are recruiting for two experienced Economists to join the Department for Education’s Central Economics Team.
This well-established and award-winning team is part of the Central Economics & Evaluation Division in DfE, led by our Chief Economist, and plays a pivotal role in the wider economist and analytical community.
This post will be responsible for supporting the development and delivery of the economic strategy for the department, improving DfE’s analytical approach to Spending Reviews and fiscal events, and working across government to provide economic advice.
Job description
The posts offer an exceptional opportunity to join a high-performing, strategic, and central unit delivering a high-impact programme of cross-cutting economic priorities. The successful candidates will draw upon their expertise of economic methods and wider knowledge of the education literature to ensure analysis and advice is high quality and credible.
The postholders will be responsible for:
- Supporting the development of the department’s approach to value-for-money and appraisal.
- Identifying areas for improvement in our evidence base and working with other central teams to deliver high-priority economic analysis.
- Working with the Chief Economist and senior policymakers to develop our analytical approach to Spending Reviews.
- Providing technical economic advice across the department and wider government on education economics.
- Building economic capability across the department via upskilling to both economists and non-economists.
You may also undertake your own research. This would involve independently scoping and delivering new economic research, regularly drawing on DfE’s broad and rich administrative datasets to inform policy development across all areas of DfE policy. These projects will be varied and provide the opportunity to work on high-profile projects across a diverse range of DfE areas and enable the postholder to develop and apply a wide range of analytical and policy skills. Some analysis will need to be produced at pace to short timescales while other projects will be delivered over a longer period. For these projects you would be:
- Working independently with strategy and policy colleagues to scope analytical projects, identifying priority research questions to add most value and maximise impact.
- Producing novel econometric analysis to support ministerial priorities, utilising large datasets in a new and innovative way.
- Delivering projects at pace from the start to a defined end point in an agile way, to agreed timescales.
- Liaising with and influencing senior policy colleagues, and confidently representing the analytical perspective amongst a range of stakeholders.
- Engaging with analysts across the Department to understand the existing evidence base and assure new analysis.
Person specification
Essential Criteria:
- Economic expertise: An experienced economist, confident with technical economic analysis with experience of policy appraisal and value for money analysis. Some experience of econometrics and quant analysis. A badged (or eligible to be badged) member of the Government Economic Service (GES).
- Leadership and collaboration: Ability to lead a project working effectively with a large number of analytical colleagues across team boundaries.
- Delivery: Experience of delivering complex analytical projects and technical work with a breadth of content.
- Communication: The ability to build effective relationships and communicate complicated concepts persuasively. Experience of communicating effectively with people from a policy or strategy background.
Desirable Criteria (if required):
- Experience of or expertise in education economics.
- Experience of or expertise in applied econometrics.
Desirable criteria will only be assessed at interview, in the event of a tie break situation to make an informed decision.
Technical Skills
You need to either be a badged member of the Government Economic Service, or eligible to join. In your application, please clearly state if you are already badged, or eligible to be badged. Please also complete the 250-word Technical Statement outlining the breadth of your economic expertise.
For the GES the eligibility criteria are:
- Have a first or upper second-class honours degree in economics (or international equivalent), or a postgraduate degree in economics. If it is a joint degree, at least 50% of the course modules must be in economics.
- Have studied both macroeconomics and microeconomics.
More details on eligibility for the Government Economic service can be found here.
Candidates who are already badged members of the GES will not need to undertake badging as part of the interview process (for more information see below).
Qualifications
Technical skills
We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:
- Please indicate if you are an existing GES member. If your response to the above question is no, using the links to the frameworks provided in the advert, please confirm you are eligible to become a member.
- Government Economic Service Technical Framework at SEO-level
Apply before 11:55 pm on Thursday 26th March 2026
