A Sustainable Future

This project's goal is that, by 2030, the UK will have reduced household carbon emissions by 28 per cent from 2019 levels, and will be on track to reach zero by 2048. We want to accelerate the UK’s transition to a low-carbon, productive economy by cutting UK household emissions, and to reduce skills mismatches – a major factor in lost productivity – by using data-driven approaches to give people better information about their options as they navigate the labour market

A Fairer Start

By 2030, our goal is that the UK will have eliminated the school readiness gap between those born into deprivation and their peers, with similar gains at age 16 among students receiving free school meal

A Healthy Life

These studies aim to halve the prevalence of obesity by 2030. This would increase healthy life expectancy by an average of nearly two years for around ten million people in the UK, while narrowing health inqualities between the richest and poorest in society

Other Innovation Projects

This portfolio includes projects that reflect Nesta's broader suite of experience of harnessing the collective power of diverse disciplines to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges. Drawing on a range of innovation methods that builds on expertise in data science, design, behavioural science, arts, collective intelligence and experimental research, these projects aim to drive big and meaningful change in areas not related to Nesta’s Mission areas. For more information see here: https://www.nesta.org.uk/our-innovation-methods-introduction-different-practices-used-nesta

A multi-armed randomised controlled trial comparing the efficacy of four behavioural interventions promoting lower calorie options in a simulated online food delivery platform through product positioning

The settings in which people make food choices (incl. food delivery platforms) make it increasingly difficult for people to select healthy food options and not exceed their recommended calorie intake. This could be one of the contributing factors for more than half of adults in the UK are overweight and obese. The current project aims to test the impact of positioning interventions (i.e. tweaking the order in which restaurants or food options are presented to users) designed to promote the selection of food options with fewer calories using ‘Take A BITe’, a simulated food delivery platform developed by The Behavioural Insights Team that can be adapted to run behavioural experiments. The study sample will be a nationally representative sample of UK adults who have previously used food delivery platforms. They will be randomly allocated to see either a control version of the simulated delivery platform in which the restaurants and the foods within each category (i.e. starters, mains, desserts, and drinks) of food menus are positioned in random order or a version of the simulated delivery platform featuring one of the following interventions: (1) repositioning foods, (2) repositioning restaurants, (3) combined intervention of (1) and (2), and (4) combined intervention based on kcal-price index. The study will estimate the effectiveness of interventions on the number of calories purchased as part of a food order on a simulated food delivery platform when compared to the control condition but also to each other. The study will also investigate the difference in the average calorie content of ‘mains’ on the selected restaurant’s menu and the average calorie content of standardised servings of the selected items when comparing those exposed to the interventions and those in the control group. The study will also explore differences in outcomes in terms of participants’ sex, SES, BMI, and frequency of platform use. Acknowledgements: This study is led by The Behavioural Insights Team and delivered in collaboration with Nesta and Oxford University. This work is supported by Nesta

Identifying effective teaching using MAT data

This document is a revised version of a final internal report of a quantitative project carried out in the A Fairer Start Mission. The original project was intended to be part of a stream of work, then discontinued for strategic reasons. This piece of work is a proof of concept of how value-add models, widely adopted in the American literature and practice, could be adapted and transferred to the British context. The report you will find here, and the technical supplement linked therein, have been stripped of all information that might lead to identification of our project partner, who provided data and domain expertise. Any query can be addressed to [email protected]

Public acceptability of healthy eating interventions in Wales - A randomised controlled trial

In this study, we are testing how communicating different benefits of five healthy eating policies might increase the public support towards their implementation in Wales. Our research question is: Compared to a control, which policy description(s) lead to higher support for each healthy eating policy? For each policy, we are testing three alternative descriptions that we believe may be effective at increasing the public support for the policy implementation based on evidence from previous research. We are using a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) to compare participants’ support for each of the 5 policies based on the description that they view