The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) is supporting multiple programmes that have shown a positive impact on pupil attainment (across maths or literacy) in EEF effectiveness trials to scale further to reach more schools and early years settings, including through Accelerator Fund (AF) funding from DfE. This overarching scale-up evaluation aims to draw insights and lessons across these programmes to better understand the processes, factors and context that enable programmes to reach the intended schools/early years settings and pupils, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The programmes included in this evaluation are:
- Maths Champions: a professional development programmeA programme is a package of support, including professional development, that helps early years educators to improve particular areas of practice and children’s outcomes. which builds the knowledge of nursery practitioners to support children’s early mathematical development.
- Mathematics Mastery: a whole-school subject improvement programme by Ark Curriculum Plus aiming to deepen pupils’ conceptual understanding of key mathematical concepts.
- ABRA: a Y1 reading programme supporting decoding, fluency and comprehension development.
The main purpose of the evaluation is to generate evidence and insights on scaling that can be informative for policymakers, leaders in education and researchers in the sector. For example, what scaling strategies are effective, or which funding models support sustainable adoption at scale. The evaluation will also seek to provide useful information to support programme developers as they make amendments to their models in order to scale their approaches.
The overarching evaluation will be led by Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) and Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI) with specialism in scaling and implementation.
The evaluation will include three main topic areas including reach (e.g. barriers and facilitators to take up, what strategies are effective in engaging and recruiting schools/early years settings to the programmes), implementation fidelity (e.g. what adaptations are made to the delivery for scale, what is the fidelity to the model trialled with impact) and sustainability (e.g. have the scaling mechanisms and changes set the programmes up for further scale in the future, how do subsidies impact adoption).
The evaluation aims to:
- Understand the processes, factors and context that enable programmes to scale in the English education system, generating useful information for policy-makers, programme implementers and school and early years setting leaders on how to scale interventions effectively.
- Support these particular interventions to scale effectively, by providing useful information to support programme developers to make any amendments to improve the scale-up.
The evaluation will follow a mixed methods design using a combination of interviews, surveys and observations, as well as administrative and monitoring data. For each programme, data will be collected and analysed from three sources – programme developers/delivery teams, school/nursery staff and contextual actors (these include for example policy experts, local authorities and MAT leaders). The evaluation will take a comparative case study approach to identify similarities and differences across the programmes.
Final report will be available in Spring 2027 – this will focus on the first two topics of recruitment and fidelity.
An addendum will be available in Autumn 2027 – this will focus on the third topic of sustainment.