Understanding and addressing social challenges through applied statistical methods, data science and creative microsimulation.
19th - 23rd Oct 2026 | (5 days)

All course staff are drawn from within the Common Sense Policy Group in the School of Communities and Education, Northumbria University.

The Common Sense Policy Group comprises academics, policymakers, third sector leaders, community representatives, media figures and people with lived experience. We are all committed to creating a fair, equal and inclusive Britain through developing and influencing redistributive policy that addresses the inequality and exclusion that has come to define our nation. We present consensus on feasible, affordable and overwhelmingly popular evidence-based policies that can form the basis for a programme for progressive Government. 

Research: We examine the impact of existing systems and what the prospective benefits of alternatives might be.

Policy: We develop evidence-based policy proposals that address key modern challenges and achieve popular support.

Engagement and impact: We create outputs and engage with partners to translate research to real-world goals.

Please direct all queries to the Course Lead, Professor Elliott Johnson (elliott.johnson@northumbria.ac.uk) 

All teaching will take place online and lectures are pre-recorded. The course is intended to take 5 days to complete. Lectures 1, 2 and 3 and Practical Demonstration 1 are intended to be taken on day 1. Lecture 4, Practical Demonstrations 2 and 3, Lecture 5 and Practical Demonstration 4 are intended to be taken on day 2. Lecture 6 and Practical Demonstrations 5-10 are intended to be taken on day 3. Lecture 7 and Lecture 8 are intended to be taken on day 4. Lecture 9-10 and the assessment are intended to be taken on day 5.

Once you have registered, you will receive a link to the full course materials and be registered and receive log in details for the Jupyter Notebooks that form the practical basis for course coding and analysis.

All lectures and practical demonstrations are available as YouTube videos with autotranscribed text. You will need to watch the lectures and follow the practical demonstration videos while working through your Jupyter Notebooks.

There will be an open online drop-in session at 16:00-17:00 each day between 19th-23rd October in which any issues can be addressed. You will receive a Teams link for these sessions.

You will submit your report for assessment 1 week after completion of the course. You will receive feedback within a further week. You will then have two weeks in which to revise your report in response to feedback before uploading your report to your Pure account (if you have one) and Open Science Framework repository. This will provide you with a CV-enhancing reference point for future work in data science.

Please raise any technical or other issues with the Course Lead, Elliott Johnson at elliott.johnson@northumbria.ac.uk.

Completing this course gives you the tools to shape public policy. You will continue to have access to the course resources, including textbook, videos and online activities, providing a pathway to development of new and more complex forms of modelling and analysis.