In the EEF’s first decade, our evaluation activity focused primarily on existing programmes. We wanted to understand whether a programme had the potential to support schools and teachers to improve outcomes for socio-economically disadvantaged pupils. We’ve learnt – and continue to learn – a lot from this. But it also became increasingly clear that there were areas of practice with promising evidence where there just weren’t enough programmes available to help schools and other education settings put them to use. As we increased our understanding of the evidence around professional development and implementation , we wanted to help fill these evidence-to-practice gaps by supporting the development of new programmes.
In 2022, we launched our early-stage programme development (ESPD) stream of work. Since then, we’ve supported more than 75 new projects at the innovation and development stages of our programmes pipeline. Today, we’ve published a short guide, which distils some of the key principles from this emerging area of our work.
What does our ESPD work look like?
Our ESPD work was set up to help build evidence into programme design, particularly in the areas of professional development and implementation. To do this, we fund developers to design and/or refine their programme using a Theory of Change (ToC), deliver their programme to a small number of settings (five to 12), and capture formative feedback from practitioners. The ultimate aim of this is to help create potentially promising, evidence-based programmes that are ready for delivery at a larger scale and for independent evaluation in the future.
Our ESPD team supports developers through a series of workshops, one-to-one ongoing support, and resources: in our new short guide we share insights from the key principles of this work.
1. Develop a robust Theory of Change
Using a Theory of Change process provides structure to think through underpinning assumptions and theories and helps programme developers to deliver their programme with consistency – although it can be tempting for developers to want to move ahead to designing materials and delivering their programme!
2. Address specific educational challenges
In our ESPD work, we help developers design, step by step, how a programme will address an educational challenge and achieve a particular change. We support developers to think about the target group(s) of children and young people that they aim to support, as well as the changes that they expect to see in children and young people, practitioners, and other relevant stakeholders, on the way to achieving their long-term aim.
3. Be precise about which behaviours you want to change
This, in turn, helps developers to think about the educator behaviours they want to change. Being precise about this is often something developer teams find difficult, but feedback so far has been that wrestling with this and being specific about the existing barriers that stop educators using those behaviours have really helped with designing the implementation strategies needed as part of the support. One example of this is providing worked examples as part of the training for practitioners that can be used as models with children and young people.
4. Utilise formative feedback
Another big difference to other streams of our work is how we’ve supported developers with planning their collection of formative feedback to answer research questions about the feasibility and acceptability of their programme. We’ve been impressed by the depth and quality of feedback that developers have collected. While this is different to an independent evaluation, developers have found the feedback really useful in thinking about how to adapt their programme in the future.
What’s next?
Broadly, we want to continue to grow the number of potentially promising, evidence-based programmes available to settings where there are evidence-to-practice gaps, particularly those that have the potential to support socio-economically disadvantaged pupils, through our research agenda themes.
We’ll continue to support new and developing programmes to iterate and improve so that they are ready for an independent evaluation – at pilot phase, or through a larger trial. But we know there are many organisations that either support or fund early-stage development of programmes or develop programmes themselves.
We hope this guide is a contribution in supporting the wider system to build in evidence to programme design and are keen to continue to share and work with other organisations to do this.
Find out more
Find out more about our ESPD and the projects that we’ve supported. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/early-stage-programme-development
Apply for funding
Explore our current funding opportunities for development projects as part of our Spring funding round (open until 4th April): Writing in Key Stages 1 – 4: Spring 2024 Grant-funding Round | EEF (educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk)