POLICY AND PRACTICE The Education Endowment Foundation
What we know
● The £200 million Education Endowment Foundation will adopt an evidence- based approach to its work to improve the attainment of the poorest children in underperforming schools in England.
● Robust evaluation of interventions proposed by schools and other organisations will be at the heart of the EEF’s work, with at least 10% of funds devoted to evaluations.
● The EEF aims to produce broader lessons on how best to boost attainment for all schools, with an interactive Which? style guide showing what works best, and also what doesn’t work, in the classroom.
Some of the answers to these questions lie with the pupil premium toolkit published by the Sutton Trust last year. This promises to be the living, breathing document at the heart of the EEF’s research efforts, as it adds hard evidence to what we know works best in the classroom. An attempt to help schools to decide how to deploy their “pupil premium” funds for poorer children, the toolkit is an accessible Which? style guide summarising research from across the world to compare the impact (in pupils’ extra months of development) and cost effectiveness of different approaches in schools. Next year an updated version will be launched on the EEF website, as an interactive resource for teachers. The toolkit’s main author, Professor Steve Higgins, from Durham University, stresses that the kit is not intended to provide “off- the shelf” solutions that are the latest to guarantee overnight success; it is simply outlining the best bets – the approaches that consistently show greater impact on attainment.
The hope is to empower teachers to
embrace an evidence-based approach so they can make decisions for themselves, and monitor the impact of interventions in their own context. The dream is to establish “research leaders” among senior staff in every school. The toolkit’s fi ndings have already
ruffl ed a few feathers in the educational establishment – challenging some of the assumptions that small reductions in class sizes, for example, or employing teaching assistants are good ways of raising attainment. The evidence suggests not. It should surprise few teachers that the highest ranked approaches in the toolkit concern the interaction between teacher and pupil in the classroom; the impact of school structural reforms pale into insignifi cance in comparison. Amid the ever growing market
of educational initiatives being promoted to head teachers, this could be one of the great legacies of the EEF: to help debunk some of the unsubstantiated claims that plague the teaching profession.
A fi nal thought on evidence-based education
The scepticism towards the evidence-based approach was met with a compelling riposte from the EEF’s chief executive, Dr Kevan Collins, during the foundation’s inaugural conference in October. Is it not a waste of our public money and even unethical to keep
pursuing approaches in schools that could be having little, or even a negative impact on the learning of our children, particularly those from poorer backgrounds? That is the question that every teacher needs to ponder on. Indeed one day I hope it will not only be researchers and educationalists asking these questions. It will be parents and children demanding: “Show me the evidence!”
About the author Dr Lee Elliot Major is director for research and policy at the Sutton Trust and chair of the EEF’s evaluation advisory group.
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