Regular visitors to the EEF’s site will have noticed that we’ve undergone something of a face lift in recent weeks. But this isn’t just a cosmetic ‘nip and tuck’; our new and improved site, designed to make the EEF’s plethora of resources as user-friendly and accessible as possible, is the result of six months of collaboration with senior leaders and teachers from across the country.
The content remains the same – we’ve still got toolkit pages, project summaries and families of schools data – but the new style and layout links our projects and resources more closely to the school improvement cycle so they’re as relevant as possible to you and your colleagues.
So, with the smashing of a champagne bottle over her bow, let’s officially launch the EEF’s new website and give you a quick snapshot of what’s changed:
1.‘Projects, what projects?’
About half of our users get to the EEF’s site by ‘googling’ EEF Toolkit and landing directly on the Teaching and Learning Toolkit page. But from there it used to be hard to easily explore the individual pages of the 121 projects the EEF has funded, meaning many of their valuable lessons and insights were difficult to extract. To solve this, the Toolkit now links directly to the project pages, which employ a smarter filtering system so you can easily find relevant projects by theme, key stage and stage of trial. A new tool that summarises research findings by theme will launch soon.
2. How can you use evidence in your school?
Evidence doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it’s only valuable if it has a use in the real world, such as helping you to respond to a particular question or challenge in your school. To help make our resources as practical as possible, the new homepage identifies where evidence fits in a cycle of school improvement. You can click on a section and follow the arrows to explore how we are developing new tools to help make evidence more applicable. We’ll be adding more content and tools to the cycle over the next few months, including the hotly anticipated primary families of schools database.
3. DIY!
The EEF’s aim is to help close the attainment gap by funding, summarising and disseminating evidence to build an education system built on the best research.In our first five years we’ve focused on the funding and summarizing bit, but as our work moves onto dissemination and helping schools act on the evidence, we need a website that can help us communicate the many different aspects of our work. Evaluating and monitoring the impact of interventions is a critical area for schools, especially in a post-levels world, so we’ll be adding more guidance and tools on how to ‘do-it-yourself’ after Easter.
4. An expanding digital library
The EEF’s ever-growing library of useful resources covers a whole host of different teaching and learning areas. The new site’s free resource library aims to make this as navigable as possible and everything, including Toolkit summaries, project reports, literature reviews, toolkit videos and presentations, can be searched and downloaded. Over the next few months, we’ll be adding 20 new evaluation reports as well as a guidance report.
The new site is designed to communicate our work more effectively to teachers and school leaders. We’re constantly developing and improving it so we’d love to get your feedback. Get in touch at: info@eefoundation.org.uk