A team from the University of Oxford, Department of Education, was appointed to investigate the effects of EEF interventions on protection from COVID-19 learning loss.
We know that COVID-19 disrupted teaching and learning for children and schools in England, but less is known about how and why the effects of this disruption may have varied. This project explores whether and how much participating in educational interventions – originally intended to support children’s educational outcomes such as literacy or mathematics – may have also reduced learning loss due to COVID-19 disruption.
The team will use data from the Education Endowment Foundation Data Archive (covering interventions from 2015/16 to 2018/19) alongside data from the National Pupil Database (NPD), which includes information for all students in English state schools. By linking EEF trial data with the NPD, researchers will analyse long-term outcomes in key educational stages: KS1, KS2, and KS4, focusing on subject areas that align with each trial’s primary outcome.
Using this linked data, the team will compare the predicted vs. actual educational outcomes of students who took part in EEF trials before COVID-19, aiming to quantify learning loss. Further, they will compare outcomes for students in intervention versus control groups to determine whether intervention participation influenced the extent of learning loss.
This project is part of a wider portfolio of projects to pilot and facilitate the creation of resources to enable researcher access to the EEF archive.
This project was funded by a grant from the Evaluation Task Force (Cabinet Office/HM Treasury) and its Evaluation Accelerator Fund.
In 2022, the EEF received funding from the Evaluation Accelerator Fund (EAF) to accelerate third-party access to the EEF Data Archive. Part of that funding was to commission two research projects in priority education areas to conduct secondary data analysis using EEF’s archive data. This project is one of them.
Findings of this project will provide valuable insights into individual and types of interventions that may have reduced the learning loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The project is also designed to facilitate the creation of resources to enable researcher access to the EEF Data Archive.
The evaluation report will be published in Summer 2026.