Laura is a Labour Market Researcher at Inclusion. She joined the organisation as an intern and, in recent months, has progressed to Research Assistant and then Researcher.

She conducts and manages a wide range of research and analysis, including the review and aggregation of statistical sources, cost-benefit analyses, online surveying, literature reviews, and qualitative interviewing. She also frequently presents Inclusion’s work at events and conferences, and has experience of coordinating workshops and roundtable meetings.

Laura is Inclusion’s policy lead on child poverty issues. As part of this role she has designed a comprehensive child poverty training module for Sheffield City Council and has re-developed Inclusion’s Child Poverty Toolkit, a dynamic and easily accessible one-stop shop for analysis of the multiple factors that make up child poverty at the local level. Laura has additional in-depth policy expertise in young people and employment, benefit reform and making work pay, welfare to work programmes, and social housing.

Laura is currently managing a project assessing housing providers’ approaches to tackling worklessness for the housing action charity, HACT, and is part of the team conducting the Work Programme Evaluation for the Department for Work and Pensions. Previously, she completed an independent national evaluation of the Future Jobs Fund, which summarised the schemes benefits, areas for improvement, impact and value for money, and offered key policy recommendations on the basis of these findings.

Laura is an experienced user of SPSS, Microsoft Excel and R for the purposes of data analysis. Her role builds on skills and experience gained during her Masters degree in Public Policy.

Research interests and expertise:

• Child poverty
• Young people and employment
• Benefit reform and making work pay
• Welfare to work programmes, especially the Work Programme
• Housing and worklessness