Today (Wednesday 21 May 2025), the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has launched comprehensive updates to ten strands of its flagship Teaching and Learning Toolkit, including approaches such as metacognition and oral language.

The Toolkit is a free, easy-to-use resource designed to support teachers and school leaders in making evidence-informed decisions to improve pupil learning outcomes. It summarises findings from a wide global evidence base across more than 30 different approaches, from tutoring, to parental engagement and mentoring, including suggestions for schools on how they could implement an approach in practice.

Each strand presents the latest research on how different strategies can improve attainment, alongside information on average costs and the strength of the evidence. With this release, the EEF is launching a new approach to evidence synthesis: each strand will now be updated annually, transforming the Toolkit into a ​‘living systematic review’, ensuring school leaders have access to the most accurate and up-to-date evidence available.

One of the strands included in this first set of updates is metacognition, consistently one of the most accessed strands in the Toolkit. The update adds information from 107 new studies, many from international contexts, improving global representation. Importantly, it also offers more practical guidance for teachers on how to embed metacognitive strategies in classroom practice. The latest evidence shows the estimated impact of this approach has increased from an additional seven months’ progress to eight months for pupils.

Another updated strand, oral language, now includes 34 additional studies, with an increased focus on interventions tested in early years and primary settings.

Since its launch in 2011, the Teaching and Learning Toolkit has become one of the most widely used educational evidence resources in England. 69 percent of headteachers and school leaders report using the Toolkit to inform their decisions ⁽¹⁾, and it receives over 20,000 online users per month ⁽²⁾. In a context where leaders face time and workload pressures, the Toolkit provides a clear and accessible summary of high-impact approaches to support all pupils to thrive.

Each Toolkit strand includes a dedicated section highlighting key considerations for closing the attainment gap between pupils from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers.

The 10 strands updated in this batch are: 

• Social and emotional learning
• Mentoring
• Summer schools
• Extending school time
• Oral language interventions
• Parental engagement
• Peer tutoring
• Behaviour Interventions
• Metacognition
• Physical Activity