125september2004

possibility spacep o s s i b i l i t y s p a c e

career story: Offi cial Statistician

It was a desire to travel which first attracted Melissa Rice to a career in the Civil Service. And, even though she hasn’t yet done as much travelling as she would like, she already has several job changes under her belt and, as she tells Helen Joyce, opportunities to broaden her horizons in other ways.

“At school I was always quite good at maths”, says Melis-sa Rice. And, with a maths teacher for a mother and an actuary for a father, it is perhaps not surprising that, when she left school to go to Glasgow University, maths was one of her fi rst subject choices. “At Glasgow you do three subjects in the fi rst year and you don’t pick your degree subject until the third year. I picked maths be-cause I thought I’d be able to do it and I knew that there were a number of diff erent options you could take at the end of it. I wanted to do psychology as well, and then I had to pick another subject. I chose statistics; my think-ing behind this at age 18 being that it fi tted in with the timetable and it wouldn’t be too hard. I think I’d been told that if you were doing maths then statistics wasn’t that much extra. It was an easy option!”

A range of possibilities

Although Rice kept up the statistics for the second year, she chose to drop it for her fi nal two years and to work towards a maths degree. However, once she had her de-gree and was looking for jobs, it became obvious that her two years of statistics were going to be a useful addition to her skills and open up a range of possibilities outside the boundaries of academic maths. “I was looking for something that would take me away from pure maths, something that might off er a bit of travel. I’d done a lot of pure maths and I wanted to get away from it. Al-though I’d enjoyed it, there didn’t seem to be that many jobs down that line. I didn’t want to be an academic or a teacher, so I looked at other possibilities.”

Surprisingly, Rice’s fi rst job in the Civil Service came to her almost by accident. “My sister saw a job ad-

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126 september2004

possibility space

a bizarre sight fl ying in over the island, like a built-up fl oating platform.

“Maybe because it’s such a small country, the offi cials always seemed to feel that they knew the answer anyway and the statistics weren’t really valued that much. Th ere are no political parties, and not the same culture of political debate. All the newspapers and the TV station and the radio station are govern-ment run so you don’t have many diff erent views on things. Th ere’s not the same use of statistics for debate. It strengthened my belief in the importance of government statistics, though. I found myself making arguments about accountability that I wouldn’t have had to think about at home, getting back to the basics of why we’re doing things.”

Just over a year later, Rice returned to the UK. “It was going to be longer but the stats side of the work pretty much came to an end. It was a single project and I’d trained a team in the Ministry of Planning to take over on a permanent basis. So I decided at that point that it was a good idea to come back and it fi t-ted in with the posts that were available within DfID.”

So from the Maldives back to London, and Rice returned to DfID—this time work-ing in the policy and international area of the statistics department. Th ere was just time for a monitoring visit to Uganda before she was on the move once more.

“Another post was created where they wanted an assistant statistician with DfID experience. I was the only one, so they ad-vertised for my job and I moved to a post in the European Union Department in DfID. Th ere I was looking at EC expenditure and development. Th e system of funding in the EC meant that part of the expenditure came under DfID’s budget and we tried to forecast what that might be in the future. Th e work was very specifi c.”

Home experience

At this point, Rice became aware that, despite having worked in the Civil Service for several years, she knew a good deal about the statisti-cal and political systems of various countries and international organisations but very little about the UK system. “I was looking ahead to future work with developing countries, discussing statistics with the national statis-tics institutes there. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to answer questions about how things were done in the UK if anyone asked. I obviously couldn’t be expected to know how everything was done, but I knew I’d need more experi-

ence than I had, so I took a post with ONS in Pimlico, in the international branch working on European issues.”

Th e post involved co-ordinating the brief-ing of the National Statistician or other senior statisticians for meetings, making sure they had to hand all relevant information which had been introduced at the working level. “I got to see a wide range of UK statistics from that post. I didn’t just get to hear about the is-sues in, say, the labour force; it was the whole spectrum of issues that came up in Europe.”

Another brief spell at DfID followed be-fore Rice took the decision to leave develop-ment, at least for a while, and to move to her current post as a statistics researcher with the Statistics Commission. Th e job involves look-ing into the statistics behind any topic which the Commission feels needs consideration. Th e Commission’s role is to help to ensure that of-fi cial statistics are trustworthy and responsive to public needs. It is currently undertaking a review of education, which she will be heavily involved in. Th ere is also a public access side to her work: “Th ere are issues that people write to us about or that come up in the press. For example, we might need to look into a breach of one of the protocols, or investigate issues the Commissioners are concerned about.”

Working for the Statistics Commission off ers Rice a closer link with the general public than her previous posts, and she feels this is important. “All the other jobs I’ve done have re-ally been about serving the needs of offi cial us-ers of statistics whereas this is defi nitely a step closer to aiding the general public in their use of stats. I now have to put a lot more thought into who else is going to be using these statis-tics and what they’re using them for.”

And as for the future? “Th e idea is to go back to DfID in a couple of years’ time—maybe go for one of their overseas postings. Working in development enables you to look at a broad spectrum of statistics, but at some point in the future I may do something a bit more special-ised in a fi eld other than development.”

Th e career development prospects are ob-viously excellent in the Civil Service, but that’s not the only aspect of the work that appeals to Rice. “One of the aspects to my job that I re-ally like is the element of ‘identifying the truth’. Th ere’s also a much better balance in Civil Service and government between work and social life than in certain parts of the private sector. And I haven’t given up on the prospects for travel!”

Melissa Rice is a Statistics Researcher at the Statistics Commission in London, on secondment from DfID.

vertised in the Glasgow Herald and said: ‘Why don’t you go for that?’ It was a government job as a statistician in the Department for In-ternational Development [DfID] in East Kil-bride, which is just outside Glasgow. I’d never really thought of applying to the Civil Service before, but it sounded quite interesting and it had a certain feel-good factor to it—working in international development.”

Fortunately, the post simply required someone with a “numerate” degree, not spe-cifi cally statistics, so she applied and got the job. “I was working on a publication called ‘Statistics on International Development’. It mostly concerns fi nancial fl ows. I was looking a lot at the statistics that are used in parlia-mentary questions—when there’s an answer drafted we help people to fi nd the fi gures and use them appropriately, or we check that their answers are fair and correct. I also reported fi gures to OECD, which meant I got a trip to Paris.”

In 1999, Rice also got to go to the Glas-tonbury Festival—as a last-minute stand-in for the Information Department, who were short of people to go to explain debt relief statistics. “We were situated right across from a ‘Legalise Cannabis’ campaign tent, and they were car-rying out a survey. We spent many hours dis-cussing the various sources of bias!”

Overseas at last

As her post was “fast-track”, Rice would have been expected to move posts every year or so. However, there were simply not enough suita-ble posts for her in East Kilbride and although she did consider going to work for the Scot-tish Executive, she decided on the spur of the moment to try something completely diff erent and applied to Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). As a result, she fi nally got to do some of the travelling she’d always wanted, and was sent out to the Maldives.

“I went through VSO with DfID’s sup-port. I was getting country experience, and it was all very relevant, so DfID let me take a ca-reer break and have a job waiting for me when I came back.”

Rice stayed out in the Maldives for just over a year, working on a database of develop-ment indicators for the Maldives government and also doing some non-statistical work on co-ordination of the UN agencies. “Working on statistics out there is so diff erent from in the UK because it’s such a small country—the population is about 300 000. On Male’, the capital, they have 100 000 people and you can walk round the whole island in an hour. It was

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