Guidance on using the Evaluation Registry

This page provide guidance for Civil Servants using the Evaluation Registry

GUIDANCE ON USING THE EVALUATION REGISTRY

1.1. All planned, live, and completed Government evaluations from 1st April 2024 onwards must be registered on the Government Evaluation Registry. 

1.2. This applies to planned evaluations, live evaluations, and evaluation reports produced by all Central Government Departments.* It also includes all evaluations of Government Major Projects, including where these are delivered and/or evaluated by external organisations.

1.3. In this guidance, the word “intervention” is used to apply to any policy, project or programme delivered by a Government Department.

1.4. To be categorised as an evaluation, the research should involve the application of one or more evaluation methods as defined in the Magenta Book. These include impact, process and value-for-money evaluations. These might be evaluations of major projects, evidence syntheses, pilot studies, or other types of evaluation research. If you are not sure whether a piece of research classifies as an evaluation, please get in touch with the Evaluation Task Force ([email protected]).

1.5. A Registry entry for a new planned evaluation should be created once the first version of the evaluation plan has been signed off for publication through the relevant internal governance process. This should happen no later than the first round of data collection. Entries should be updated as required to reflect future versions or changes to the evaluation plan.

1.6. One entry should be created per evaluation. If an evaluation contains multiple aspects, for example, a cost benefit analysis and a randomised control trial, these should both be included in a single entry. Users can add links to multiple published reports in a single entry, and should not create multiple entries per evaluation report.