Donald Hirsch was an Associate Fellow of the Resolution Foundation and is Director of the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University. He started his career as a journalist, and worked on the staff of The Economist in the late 1980s. He then spent three years on the staff of the OECD, comparing education and related policies of countries around the world. In the past fifteen years, his consultancy work has involved writing reports and making linkages between evidence and policy for a range of public bodies, charities and other organisations. From 1998 to 2008 he was Poverty Adviser to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, where he played a leading role in developing the Foundation’s analysis of child poverty, as well as working on a range of other poverty-related topics.