Danielle Mason and Jonathan Kay introduce EEF commentaries and explain how they can help schools make best use our evaluation reports.
Today, for the first time, the findings from each of our newly published projects will be accompanied on our website by a short commentary. Our goal in introducing these commentaries is to let teachers and school leaders know more about the implications of our report findings.
This is something of a departure for us. To date we have taken the view that the results of our independent evaluations speak for themselves. We strive to make our findings as accessible as possible. We ask our evaluators to describe impact in terms of months’ progress. We have adopted a simple five-point ‘padlock’ scale to describe the quality of the evidence. And our key conclusions for each project always cover implementation as well as impact
Further questions
But sometimes the findings of an individual report, however well presented, raise further questions. Take today’s report on Parent Academy. Our trial did not provide any evidence that this twelve week course for parents of primary pupils had any impact on attainment. How should teachers interpret this? On the face of it, it might suggest that schools should give up on parental engagement activity. But this is not the case: this single study does not negate the existing evidence on parental engagement overall. Indeed, we have another report out today which shows that texting parents information about tests and homework can have a positive impact on attainment. And we’re also publishing some promising – but not conclusive – results for a third programme called SPOKES, which helps parents of younger children to support their reading. So how can we ensure that teachers have access to this contextual evidence when they click on just one of our reports?
That’s exactly what we hope to achieve with the new commentaries. Of course, there are risks involved. Describing the context requires us to go beyond the findings of an individual report and draw on other evidence. This means we need to make judgements; judgements about which other evidence is relevant and which is not, judgements about the extent to which we can generalise from particular findings, and judgements about how to do this effectively in a few short paragraphs.