The Fellowship is with the Northern Ireland Department for Economy and is titled, Post-School Special Educational Needs Policy Fellowship. This fellowship will embed him directly within government analytical teams to help shape policy on post-school provision for young people with special educational needs (SEN) in Northern Ireland.
Dr Azpitarte joined Loughborough University in September 2018 and brings deep expertise at the intersection of social policy, child development, inequality, and quantitative analysis. He holds a PhD in Economics and has extensive experience using large, complex datasets to generate evidence on how socioeconomic environments and policies influence children and young people’s development and opportunities. His work also focuses on causal inference and advanced quantitative methods that produce policy-relevant insights for vulnerable populations.
Before Loughborough, Dr Azpitarte served as Ronald Henderson Fellow at the University of Melbourne, a role jointly appointed with a leading anti-poverty organisation to support research that informs policy and public debate. He has also acted as a reviewer for major economic, education, and social policy journals and is an active member of national and international research communities.
Policy Fellowship: advancing SEN evidence with longitudinal analysis
The UKRI Policy Fellowships scheme embeds academic researchers within UK government departments to undertake focused research that directly informs public policy. Fellows spend an 18-month period - including an inception phase, main placement and knowledge exchange phase - working closely with policy teams to co-design research and generate evidence on priority government challenges.
Dr Azpitarte’s fellowship is hosted by the Department for Economy (DfE) in Northern Ireland and focuses on post-school Special Educational Needs policy - an area identified as a key priority within the Northern Ireland Programme for Government 2024-2027, which emphasises improved support for young people with SEN after they leave school.
The fellowship will harness the novel LEO NI dataset (Longitudinal Education and Outcomes) to provide in-depth, longitudinal analysis of the barriers faced by school leavers with SEN, exploring their education, training and employment pathways. Dr Azpitarte’s research will investigate outcomes for school leavers with SEN and assess the impact of current skills and education programmes. This evidence will help inform a comprehensive review of post-school SEN provision and support the development of a coherent policy framework tailored to Northern Ireland’s context.
Working as an Accredited Researcher with access to secure administrative data and ESRC-funded longitudinal sources like CLOSER, Dr Azpitarte will be positioned to generate robust, policy-relevant insights that are rare in current UK SEN research. His placement will also involve regular engagement with policymakers from both DfE and the Department of Education, as well as with stakeholders from the wider UK LEO and Northern Ireland research communities.
During the fellowship, Dr Azpitarte will also disseminate his findings through policy-oriented reports, seminar presentations and academic outputs, subject to relevant clearance processes. He will help build analytical capacity within government and strengthen longer-term collaboration between academia and policy teams.
The fellowship is due to begin in February 2026, and Dr Azpitarte’s work is expected to make a significant contribution to understanding and improving post-school support for young people with SEN in Northern Ireland and beyond.