Building the pipeline of evidence-informed programmes.

From 2021 – 2025, we’ll be supporting more schools, colleges, and nurseries to access evidence-based programmes through the Department for Education’s Accelerator Fund.

The Accelerator Fund is part of the Government’s investment in education recovery and is focused on literacy and numeracy programmes.

Settings in England can take part in evidence-based programmes – funded through the Accelerator Fund – at all stages of their development. These include:

Trials of innovative approaches that show promise in raising pupil attainment.
Scale-up of programmes that have been proven in an EEF trial to raise pupil attainment.

Capability building support

Projects often face common challenges as they scale, and we know that if the scaling process is not conducted effectively, this can reduce impact. As part of Accelerator Fund activity, we have commissioned capability building work to support delivery teams at the scale up stage of our pipeline with challenges they face in scaling.

See key outputs for delivery teams from our capability and scaling work here.

Early Stage programme development

The EEF’s early- stage programme development work was initially set up in 2021 via the Accelerator Fund to support the design of new and developing programmes with the potential to support children and young people to improve their outcomes and to help reduce the attainment gap between socio-economically disadvantaged pupils and their classmates. This work provides support to help create potentially promising programmes for future evaluation.

For more information on the early-stage programmes that we have funded see: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/early-stage-programme-development

We’ve also distilled five key lessons to help others in developing or refining programmes, or adapting existing programmes to new contexts:

The EEF Guide to Early Stage Development

Early Stage Development Programme – A 5 Step Approach

Grantee guide and policies

The EEF grantee guide contains useful information on the setting up, management, and completion of EEF projects. There are also specific guides on creating a logic model and how to recruit and retain schools to your trial.

You can also download the EEF’s policies on reporting and publications, intellectual property, and the relationship between the grantee and the evaluator.

For more information on the EEF’s support for capability building and scaling programmes please visit capability and scaling support for delivery teams.

In addition to these resources, it is recommended that you review the guide to EEF evaluation (including data protection) for grantees on the public section of our website here.