Speakers: GSS Conference 2026
The conference includes a range of speakers addressing the theme of ‘Data Storytelling: what statistics can tell us’. Explore this page to learn about this year’s speakers and their sessions – further sessions will be announced in the lead-up to the conference.
Visit the agenda webpage for more information about session timings throughout the day.
Keynote sessions
This year’s conference includes two online and two in-person keynotes, which will be announced shortly.
In person
Dame Angela’s speech, ‘Data for scenarios’, will reflect on how judicious use of data has improved the delivery of science advice to policy and decision makers, specifically in the generation of future scenarios.
There will be an elongated opportunity for questions at the end of the speech: we welcome attendees to prepare their questions in advance.
Speaker: Dame Angela McLean
Professor Dame Angela McLean DBE FRS is the Government Chief Scientific Adviser having taken up the role in April 2023. She is also Head of the Government Science and Engineering Profession.
Prior to this Angela was the Chief Scientific Adviser for the Ministry of Defence. Her official biography is available on GOV.UK.
Based on insights gained from three decades of working with official statistics in both the public and private sector, this session will focus on practical tips, principles and guidance for researchers looking to develop confidence in presenting their work.
Speaker: Alan Smith OBE
Alan Smith is Head of Visual and Data Journalism at the Financial Times. He leads the newsroom team of data reporters and visual journalists. A data visualisation specialist, his TEDx talk, Why You Should Love Statistics, was featured on TED.com in 2017. Alan is the author of How Charts Work, a handbook on designing with data using the FT’s principles. He is also Honorary Professor of Practice at UCL’s Social Data Institute.
Before joining the FT, he was Head of Digital Content at the Office for National Statistics, where he was awarded an OBE in 2011 for services to official statistics.
Alan shared his reflections ahead of the session:
“I’m delighted to be speaking at this year’s GSS conference and reconnecting with the statistical community where I began my career. With the GSS’s focus on best practice and engagement, it will be a chance for me to draw on my experience and discuss parallels between the worlds of journalism and official statistics, as well as some subtle and not-so-subtle differences!”
Online
We understand society, the economy, and human wellbeing through the window of data. But data represent the world in terms of a limited number of dimensions. This means there is a risk that the questions we want to answer might be poorly represented by interrogations of our data. This talk illustrates this risk and suggests ways to mitigate it.
Speaker: David Hand OBE
David Hand is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Senior Research Investigator at Imperial College, London, where he formerly held the Chair in Statistics.
He is a past president of the Royal Statistical Society and has served in various roles in official statistics, including chairing the Administrative Data Research Network and the National Statistician’s Expert User Advisory Committee and spending eight years on the Board of the UK Statistics Authority.
David has advised a wide variety of private sector companies, especially in the pharmaceutical and consumer finance sector, and served as Chief Scientific Advisor to Winton Capital Management.
He has published over 300 scientific papers and 33 books, the latest of which is What’s the Question? Deciding What You Really Want to Know.
David shared his reflections ahead of the session:
“Statistics is the most exciting of disciplines. After all, by definition, the statistician is there when the data divulge their secrets and the discoveries are made. This means that statisticians often see things that no-one else has seen.”
Available at both events
Workshop
This is a hands-on workshop with group activities that will challenge your knowledge, assumptions and what’s possible in telling good stories with statistics through data visualisations.
Smearing data through text doesn’t tell clear stories and neither does overwhelming your audience with tens of complex charts. Communicating with data requires a careful balance of statistics, design and storytelling – combined together with a thorough understanding of the graphical representation of data.
In this workshop, Charlotte will demonstrate the fundamentals of the visual communication of data grounded in almost a century of research into how humans understand charts, and how to craft engaging and impactful stories through preattentive attributes. This is where some workshops would end. But that would could create compliance issues for public bodies because the GSS must meet accessibility needs and standards to ensure visualisation choices are accessible for all users. Charlotte will also expose the fundamental lack of accessibility in default data visualisation and provide guidance on how to build data stories that are accessible for all users.
Speaker: Charlotte Hadley
Charlotte Hadley is founder of Visible Data and a leader in accessible, interactive data visualisation with over a decade of experience building commercial dataviz services in academia and industry.
Charlotte founded the Interactive Data Network at University of Oxford in 2016 which provides academics across the university advice, consulting and hosting for data visualisations that bridge the data gap between publication and data. The IDN worked in collaboration with OuP and other academic publishers to promote reproducible research data pipelines.
More recently, Charlotte has lectured in data science and data ethics at BCU and built a data storytelling and visualisation centre of excellence within the Data Academy at Admiral.
In 2026, Charlotte founded Visible Data to solve an GenAI generated problem – data is just being smeared through text without thought for storytelling or accessibility. Pier is our solution to that. It’s a data communication workspace with accessible data visualisation recommendation and data storytelling coaching embedded directly into it.
Delivered with the RSS
This workshop is provided by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), in collaboration with Charlotte Hadley, founder of Visible Data. The RSS is one of the world’s most respected organisations championing the power of data to inform understanding, shape policy, and drive decisions for the public good. They collaboratively delivered the RSS/GSS Future Statistician Vision.
The RSS will be available throughout breaks in the exhibition area in-person, and will host an online drop-in during the lunch break for online attendees.
Panel sessions
This year’s conference includes two panel sessions, which will be announced shortly.
Parallel sessions
Parallel sessions happen simultaneously. Attendees will select one of five sessions at three intervals during the day to attend.
Parallel sessions are the same for both the in-person and online event.
Session one: Putting user needs at the heart of statistics
Speakers: Livia Hull (Senior Analytical Data Scientist) and Arinze Ugwu (Principal Analytical Data Scientist), Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade
About the session
In this session, the Global Supply Chains Intelligence Programme (GSCIP) team will explore practical government impact from their recent project, demonstrating how the supply chains of UK companies are connected to global networks of suppliers, customers and products. They will demonstrate how these relationships can be mapped, modelled and understood. By representing supply chain data as a network, the team will show how network science and graph algorithms can reveal hidden dependencies and diversification opportunities. This approach transformed complex, interconnected data into actionable intelligence, supporting faster, evidence-led government decisions.
About GSCIP
The Global Supply Chains Intelligence Programme (GSCIP) is a world-leading, award-winning cross-government capability hosted by Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) and funded by nine partner departments, making it directly relevant to wider government. Recognised through the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS) Procurement of the Year award and the 2026 Analysis in Government (AIG) Impact in Analysis award for outstanding impact, GSCIP is saving millions of pounds through cross-government data sharing while transforming complex supply chain data into actionable intelligence.
GSCIP has scaled from an HM Treasury Shared Outcomes Fund pilot into a £10m+ national capability with 200+ users, combining commercial and HM Government microdata at large scale, including record-level HMRC data, to provide multi-tier visibility across companies, products, components and geographies. In the last year, GSCIP has supported more than 100 use cases, including trade negotiations, crisis response, critical technology resilience, inward investment, national security assessments and operational enforcement.
Speaker: Clare Betts, Lead statistician for biodiversity and wildlife statistics, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
About the session
This session will tell the story of nature’s decline by showcasing statistics that reflect the breadth of the team’s work and demonstrate how different aspects of the environment have changed in recent decades. It will also explore the team’s recent approach to user engagement, including developments to indicators of species abundance that, once fully developed, will track the government’s progress towards statutory biodiversity targets. The speakers will explain how engagement with users has shaped the development and presentation of these statistics, helping publications tell a more coherent story and ensuring the evidence remains useful to stakeholders as it evolves in the coming years.
The Environmental Statistics and Research team in Defra produces a wide range of statistics on biodiversity and the wider environment, working with nearly 200 internal and external data providers. Many of these official statistics feed into Defra’s Environmental Indicator Framework, the principal source of evidence for its annual progress report on the Environment Improvement Plan.
Speakers: Jamie Thomas (Local Government Finance Settlement Strategy and Delivery Lead) and Hasnain Muhammad, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, joined by Ali Patrick Eneji (MHCLG) for the online session
About the session
Local government is central to some of the biggest questions facing government: how should we fund services, support growth, and shift power away from Whitehall? But telling a clear story about the sector is difficult. The evidence cuts across funding, resilience, deprivation, demand, debt, services, and outcomes, whilst attracting political interest.
This session shares how analysts in MHCLG worked across policy, strategy, communications, and Private Offices to turn that evidence base into a visual narrative for Ministers to deliver the biggest overhaul in local government funding in over a decade. We learned that good data storytelling was not just about finding the right analytical technique; it depended on building relationships, trust, and credibility to understand what Ministers were trying to say, being in the room whilst the story developed, and framing messaging to land without compromising analytical integrity. We will explore what happens when policy narratives and analytical evidence develop on separate tracks, and how collaborative working produced something stronger than either could alone.
As devolution reshapes the way government works, every department will increasingly need to understand local government and the places its policies affect. This session will bring that system to life, whilst offering practical lessons on how analysts can work across professional boundaries to put evidence at the heart of complex political issues.
Speaker: Maeve McMahon, Head of Transforming Analysis, Publications and Strategy, Home Office
About the session
What happens when Generative AI becomes one of the main ways people access official statistics?
Through discussion and interactive activities, we’ll explore how AI could transform statistical dissemination, what information AI systems need to communicate statistics responsibly, and how statisticians can help ensure official statistics remain trustworthy, visible and relevant in an AI-enabled world.
Speaker: Bethan Mulcahy, Deputy Head of International Relations, UK Statistics Authority
About the session
Internationally comparable statistics are vital for helping policymakers and the public understand how the UK is performing vis-a-vis other countries across a range of key areas from the economy to health and the environment. This requires the production of high-quality, trustworthy, comparable statistics that are produced in line with an international system of common standards, comparable data and shared statistical methods.
With the imminent launch of the new Government Statistical Service (GSS) international strategy, this session will explore how the GSS engages with the international statistical system and how its work improves data storytelling in the UK and globally. It will show how international engagement helps the UK shape standards, influence global agendas, access comparable data and learn from other National Statistical Offices and international organisations.
From international standards and AI-ready dissemination to census innovation and wellbeing measurement, the session will show how international work delivered across the GSS helps turn complex data into clearer, more meaningful narratives for decision-makers and citizens across key policy areas in the UK and globally.
Session two: Releasing the potential of data
Speaker: Megan Green, Head of Family Justice Performance Analysis, Ministry of Justice
About the session
Family justice statistics often tell us how many cases enter the system, how long they take, and what broad outcomes are reached. But behind each case number is a child’s journey through a complex system involving courts, families, local authorities, Cafcass, legal representatives, the judiciary and wider government partners.
This session will explore how family justice data can be used to move beyond headline performance measures and tell a clearer story about children’s experiences through the system. Using examples from public and private law children cases, the session will show how data on case progression, duration, hearings, outcomes and delay can be brought together to build a more meaningful picture of the child’s journey.
The session will also reflect on the limits of the data: what structured data can tell us, what it cannot explain, and where case-level or linked insight is needed to understand the “why” behind patterns such as delay or variation between areas. This includes considering how family justice data connects with the work of local authorities, DfE, Cafcass and other stakeholders involved in children’s services and outcomes.
Attendees will be invited to think about a fictionalised child’s journey and consider what questions the available data can and cannot answer. This will encourage discussion about how analysts across government can use administrative data to tell more human, policy-relevant stories while being transparent about data quality, limitations and uncertainty.
The session is relevant across government because many public services involve complex journeys across multiple agencies. It will offer practical reflections on turning operational data into insight that supports better joined-up decision-making.
Speaker: Afolabi Morakinyo, Development Lead, Department for Work and Pensions
About the session
Statistics play a vital role in helping people understand public services, but headline figures alone do not always provide the full picture. This presentation uses the latest Universal Credit statistics as a practical example of data storytelling in official statistics, demonstrating how bringing together multiple sources of evidence can provide a richer understanding of the trends and changes observed. By connecting the data, we can move beyond the numbers to better explain the factors driving change to users.
Statistics on the Universal Credit caseload attracted considerable public and media attention as the number of people receiving Universal Credit continued to rise. Viewed in isolation, this headline figure could easily suggest that increasing numbers of people were newly entering the benefit system. However, when caseload statistics were considered alongside Move to Universal Credit data, a more complete and accurate picture emerged. A substantial proportion of the increase was driven by people transferring from legacy benefits to Universal Credit through the managed migration programme, rather than by new claims alone. By bringing these data sources together, the newly developed statistics provided greater context and enabled a more informed understanding of the factors driving growth in the Universal Credit caseload, helping to refute misleading claims across government.
This presentation will show how linking related datasets helped move the narrative beyond a single headline number and provided clearer insight into the factors driving change. It will explore how clear commentary, accessible visuals and plain language can help users understand not only what has changed, but also why it has changed. The session will include short interactive questions, encouraging participants to reflect on how they interpret headline statistics and what additional context they need before drawing conclusions.
Speaker: Joseph Wilton (Head of Corporate Analysis) and Rachael Loftus, Welsh Government
About the session
The story of how recruitment data left us with a few answers and many more questions. This session will demonstrate how internal administrative data was used to tell the story of how recruitment changes interacted with different demographic groups and what that means for the diversity and inclusion within the recruitment process.
Speaker: George Pickering, Statistician, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS)
About the session
How widespread is AI adoption among the UK population? What methods are people using to improve their digital skills? Who is having positive experiences of government digital services? The DSIT Public Engagement Survey was established to answer these questions and more.
This session will explore the development of a brand-new survey, from its inception in late 2024 to the publication of its first official statistics in summer 2026. It will consider the challenges and lessons learned from managing a survey spanning several areas of the former DSIT portfolio. Particular focus will be given to collaborative survey and publication design, including how stakeholder engagement shaped the questionnaire and analytical approach.
The session will also cover the dissemination strategy, including reports, data tables, presentations and microdata tailored to different audiences. Through an interactive element, delegates will test their assumptions about public engagement with science and technology and consider lessons for designing new data collections, engaging users and communicating findings effectively.
Speaker: Rebecca Driffield (Product Manager and Area Insights Team Lead) and Carmel Howe, Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted)
About the session
We have brought together our inspection findings and visualised them for each local area in England in our new ‘Ofsted: explore an area’ service, which we launched in November 2025.
In this session we will demonstrate the website and showcase the new local area summaries we have developed. These bring together inspection, education and demographic data about an area, using charts and tables, and drawing out headlines to tell the story of an area. Our goal is to bring in more datasets to build up a richer picture and further insights, and we would value suggestions and feedback from the audience. We will provide some real-life examples of how the website has already supported important decisions across the education sector.
Session three: Transforming statistics into stories
Speaker: Anouska Pandya, Senior Assistant Statistician, National Records of Scotland
About the session
Our statistical publications contain a wealth of important information, but their impact depends on users engaging with them and understanding the story they tell. Working with the media can help statisticians to reach potential users who might not directly read our publications, and ensure that key findings are communicated accurately and clearly.
Speaker: George Feldman (Senior Statistical Officer) and Nathan Ord (Data Analyst), Office for National Statistics (ONS)
About the session
Migration statistics are among the most high-profile and frequently debated topics in public discourse, yet they are often misunderstood or misrepresented. This session will explore how migration statistics can be perceived differently by the media, policymakers, and the public, and how analysts can communicate complex messages more effectively.
Attendees will gain practical insights into some of the most common misconceptions surrounding migration statistics, including the impact of data lags on net migration estimates, misconceptions about the contribution of asylum to overall migration, and the role of British nationals within migration figures. We will also examine how key messages have been developed and presented within official statistical publications to improve public understanding and support accurate media reporting.
The session will be highly interactive. Participants will be invited to respond to real-world media headlines and statements about migration through live polls and discussions. We will also share examples of engagement with journalists and discuss how statistical teams can work with the media to improve interpretation of complex statistics.
While focused on migration, the lessons from this session are relevant across government. Many statistical topics face similar challenges around public perception, uncertainty, data limitations, and media interpretation. Attendees will leave with practical approaches to communicating statistics clearly, building trust, and ensuring key messages are understood beyond the headlines.
Speaker: Nicola Rennie, Data Visualisation Specialist, Office for National Statistics (ONS)
About the session
This interactive workshop will focus on best practices for communicating uncertainty through language and visual storytelling, to explore how uncertainty can be represented in ways that are both accurate and engaging.
By the end of the session, participants will understand why it’s important to be upfront about uncertainty and be aware of best practice principles they can use to know when and how to discuss uncertainty. Participants will learn about approaches to communicating uncertainty without overwhelming or misleading audiences. They will also develop techniques for visualising uncertainty, using a variety of different chart types.
Producers of official statistics have a responsibility to “communicate the uncertainty in estimates so that the public can have confidence in using the statistics to make decisions and take actions” as part of the Code of Practice for Statistics. Through practical exercises, real world examples, and group discussion, the session will provide a toolkit for communicating complex data in a way that allows the stakeholders, including the public, to make better evidence-based decisions.
By the end of this session, participants will:
- understand how communicating uncertainty can increase trustworthiness and know when it is important and appropriate to talk about uncertainty
- have an understanding of the language used to describe and communicate uncertainty, especially for non-technical audiences
- know when it is and isn’t appropriate to show uncertainty in visualisations, and which chart types are most effective at doing so
Speaker: Ahmad Barclay, Principal Data Visualisation Specialist, Office for National Statistics (ONS)
About the session
This teach-in session will explore how the digital content team at the ONS uses “semi-automated journalism” approaches to produce geographically localised articles and interactive content.
The session will include a live demonstration of the in-house Natural Language Generation (NLG) tools and techniques that the ONS have developed to produce publications such as Housing prices in your area, which includes hundreds of local area reports – complete with data visualisations – that are updated monthly via an automated pipeline.
In addition, the session will reflect on the benefits of this deterministic template-driven NLG approach vs the probabilistic nature of Large Language Model (LLM) outputs, but also on how the products of this approach have shown promise as an input for LLMs and for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Speaker: Penny Babb, Head of Policy and Standards, Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR)
About the session
This talk explains how clear, fact-based statistical storytelling can reduce the risk of official statistics being misunderstood or misused. Drawing on OSR guidance and the Code of Practice for Statistics, it highlights practical ways analysts can anticipate misuse risks, provide better context, explain uncertainty and limitations, and support users to reach evidence-based conclusions.
Drop-in sessions
Over the lunch break, there will be a range of drop-in sessions to attend. Further information about the topics of these drop-ins and who will be attending will be released shortly.
Exhibitions
This year’s conference includes 10 posters, which are available throughout the day. Details about the poster topics and where to find them will be included in your attendee handbook.