A premise for this presentation is that evidence-based policy is a political concept. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is an attempt to label a political process but fails to give a correct image of what is taking place. Theories in political science recognise the value-based starting points of policy instead of evidence (Baumgartner and Jones 2009; Kingdon 2003; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1999). Evidence can be seen as an impetus for change, for example, if an indicator focuses attention on a problem (Zahariadis, 2007), however, different forms of knowledge and evidence are not the key driver of (Head, 2008). In other words, knowledge, even when understood as broadly as in this symposium, can be seen as only one, indeed necessary, but not necessarily the most important element of a political process. The presentation draws on a published article and analyses how politics of evidence played its part in the policy process and created necessary room for action. It focuses on the landmark Academies Act (2010). This piece of legislation was put in motion rapidly after the formation of the Cameron–Clegg coalition government, the UK government responsible for English education. The act and its subsequent reforms have dramatically changed the English education landscape from public to private provision and delivery (Rayner et al., 2018; Salokangas and Ainscow, 2019; West and Bailey, 2013). The analysis tracks long-term structural changes in the education polity, its networks, and shifting preferences among policymakers. Data for the research are policymaker interviews after the reform, a mapping of think tanks, and a document analysis. The analysis shows that political-ideological preferences were derived from think tanks, and the Conservative manifesto built on skewed Swedish evidence in constructing an argument for the Act. The political choices morphed into fact-based arguments in the policy process. While think tanks had some reservations, in the Whitehall bureaucracy the argument was reformulated as a rational deliberation. This was possible because of the long-term change in the significance of think tanks, and how policymakers preferred politically informed opinions instead of research evidence. The presentation argues that the evidence-based policy emphasis is an attempt to depoliticise the scope for political arguments. It also opens questions for further inquiries in the KNETS project, such as what the power stake of academics in ‘evidence-based policy’ is.

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