Education Endowment Foundation:GCSE Resit Teaching Hours – Setting Choices

This study is a 16 – 19 ​‘Setting Choices’ project that aims to test how new Department for Education funding rules requiring minimum teaching hours for GCSE resit students affect maths and English GCSE outcomes in 16 – 19 settings.

Setting leaders make choices about setting-wide practices and approaches that are intended to produce positive outcomes for students, such as how to organise the learning day or communicate with families. However, many setting-level practices have limited or no evidence for them, which means leaders must make decisions using other information. The aim of Setting Choices research is to produce causal evidence about the impact of different setting-level approaches and policies on outcomes of interest, with particular attention to impact on students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Setting Choices evaluations are divided into two phases: a scoping phase, and an impact evaluation phase. During the scoping phase, the research teams will refine their research questions, verify their assumptions, and explore the feasibility of their evaluation designs.

In 2024, the Department for Education (DfE), through the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), introduced a policy encouraging 16 – 19 settings providers to deliver a minimum number of teaching hours. For full time students in the 2024 – 25 academic year, this equates to 3 hours per week for English and 4 hours for maths. From 2025 – 26, the minimum planned teaching hours requirement will be a total of 100 hours for maths and 100 hours for English, to be delivered at any point in the academic year. This expectation was introduced on a voluntary basis from September 2024 and will become a funding requirement from September 2025, with associated compliance measures.

The policy was developed in response to concerns about reduced teaching hours for resits following the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to re-establish a consistent baseline of provision, drawing on what was generally understood to be common practice before the pandemic. The overarching goal is to improve student outcomes, particularly pass rates. However, it is recognised that this change may place additional pressure on setting resources such as staffing, timetabling, and financial resources. Understanding how settings are responding to this policy and the trade-offs they face is essential.

This policy shift presents a valuable opportunity to assess the impact of increased teaching hours on student outcomes. The potential natural variation in how settings implement the policy can support a robust evaluation, contributing to the limited evidence base on timetabling and resit provision in the 16 – 19 sector. The current scoping phase is focused on understanding how the policy is being implemented and assessing whether the proposed impact evaluation design is feasible. This will depend on how settings have responded to the 2024 expectations and whether a suitable comparison group can be identified for the 2024 – 25 cohort.

This project is currently at the scoping phase. The aim of the scoping phase is to assess the feasibility of designing an impact evaluation that can produce causal evidence about the impact of GCSE resit teaching hours.

The scoping phase will:

• Understand what influences setting practices, such as resit enrolment decisions, teacher selection and teaching hours. Early findings and interviews will be used to help build a clearer picture of how things work.
• Look at the differences in how settings approach English and maths teaching hours, including a survey to learn more about how settings manage resits and to collect information on how many hours of teaching they provide, to help decide how to measure the main outcomes of the project.
• Establish how many settings have started using the new policy to see if it is possible to evaluate its impact.
• Check whether it’s possible to carry out a full impact evaluation, or whether a different evaluation method would work better.