As with so many things in education, it’s not only what you do, it’s also the way that you do it. Use this ​‘selecting interventions tool’ to see what research evidence suggests are six important areas to consider to increase the impact that your intervention offer can have for pupils:

A child ​‘doing an intervention’ is not a success criterion in and of itself; the pupil making progress and being better able to thrive in their learning are often appropriate criteria for success.

There is evidence to suggest that some interventions are better-placed to do this than others. The Projects and Promising Programmes pages on the EEF website, as well as the MetaSENse database, support school leaders to explore the best-available research evidence around interventions:

It can be helpful to promote a broad definition of intervention with colleagues. When a teacher slows down to check understanding, adds a scaffold or creates a flexible group based on appropriate formative assessment, they are intervening in order to better meet the needs of all, some or one pupil.

The following case study explores how teachers and support staff intervened with a class of learners within their Specialist Resource Hub, at the whole-class level. The EEF’s guidance report for Deployment of Teaching Assistants helps leaders to consider how TAs can support further.

Interventions must be closely matched to current barriers to learning. A reading intervention, for example, is likely to have far greater impact if it addresses the particular barrier to reading faced by a child (phonics, comprehension, fluency, motivation, etc.), rather than focusing on reading ​‘in general’.

This tool may be used to promote a whole-school understanding of SEND, using the 4 broad areas of need to encourage staff to unpick and fully understand pupils’ needs before planning interventions: