What is Peer-to-Peer Coaching?

Coachbright’s Peer-to-Peer Coaching aims to improve maths attainment by training Year 10 pupils to become academic coaches and supporting them to coach a Year 7 peer. Coaching will focus primarily on metacognitive strategies and challenging maths topics.

Who is leading this project? 

The programme is run by social mobility charity CoachBright. Their mission is focused on coaching disadvantaged young people to be confident, independent, and resilient, in order to lead the lives they desire. CoachBright has over 10 years of experience working with schools to deliver coaching programmes that support the attainment, aspirations, and life chances of disadvantaged pupils.

What will this project look like in your setting?

In 15 pairs, Year 10 pupils will deliver weekly 60-minute coaching sessions to Year 7 pupils for 10 weeks. These sessions are supported by CoachBright Programme Managers, who provide training, resource guidance, and supervision alongside an in-school coordinator. At the end of each session, this Programme Manager will also debrief with coaches and support them to develop resources for the next session.

Both coaches and coachees keep reflective journals throughout their coaching journey to track the development of skills, knowledge and confidence, as well as their developing relationship with their peer. The aim is that peer coaches will deepen their own understanding of mathematical concepts and also gain a UCAS-recognised Schools, Students and Teachers (SSAT) leadership accreditation. The programme culminates in a graduation event, which can be held at a local university or your school, celebrating progress and raising aspirations among pupils.

Schools will also be required to identify a member of staff who can take on the role of School Coordinator, responsible for scheduling coaching sessions and working alongside the CoachBright Programme Manager.

Schools assigned to the intervention groupAs part of a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT), settings will be randomised into either the intervention or control group. Settings in the intervention group will receive the programme being tested. will be asked to contribute towards the programme at a heavily (90%) discounted cost of £500. Schools allocated to the control groupAs part of a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT), settings will be randomised into either the intervention or control group. Settings in the control group continue with their usual practices and help provide a comparison to measure the intervention’s impact. They are usually offered a monetary compensation as thanks for their contribution. will continue with business as usual and will receive £750 for completing all evaluation activities. Following the trial, a selected number of schools, including those assigned to the control groupAs part of a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT), settings will be randomised into either the intervention or control group. Settings in the control group continue with their usual practices and help provide a comparison to measure the intervention’s impact. They are usually offered a monetary compensation as thanks for their contribution., may also have an opportunity to participate in a free pilot of CoachBright’s new school-led model in the academic year 2026 – 2027.

Schools will be asked to take part in evaluation requirements during the project. This will include supporting the evaluators to carry out endline pupil assessments, as well as engaging in surveys. Some schools will be asked to take part in more in-depth interviews and focus groups. Exact evaluation requirements will be set out in the information materials if you express an interest in this project.

Who can take part? 

State-funded mainstream secondary schools in England are eligible to take part if they:

• Have pupils in Year 7 and 10 on the same site during the 2025 – 2026 school year.
• Are not be participating in another maths-focused EEF trial for the same year groups in 2025 – 26. This includes Action Tutoring, Fluent and Flexible Calculators or Specialist Knowledge for Teaching Mathematics.
• Are not already be delivering the CoachBright peer-to-peer coaching programme.
• Are able to identify 15 coaching pairs (15 Year 7 and 15 Year 10 pupils) that fit the pupil eligibility (see further information below).

Pupil eligibility:

• Year 7 pupils (coachees) with low attainment in maths (determined through their SATs results – SATs score < 100).
• Year 10 pupils (coaches) with high attainment in maths (potential to achieve GCSE scores of 7 – 9 in maths).
• At least 80% (12 out of 15) of Year 7 pupils should be eligible for Free School Meals (FSM). Any other pupils identified as benefitting from peer-to-peer coaching should meet one or more of the criteria for CoachBright’s wider definition of disadvantaged (included in the School Information Sheet below).
• At least 50% (8 out of 15) of the Year 10 pupils should be eligible for FSM or should meet wider disadvantage criteria, although their maths attainment should take precedence.

The EEF Toolkit (EEF Toolkit, Peer Tutoring) suggests peer tutoring approaches result in an average of five additional months of progress annually, with even greater benefits for pupils eligible for free school meals. Evidence from the toolkit also suggests that pupils delivering the coaching sessions benefit similarly.

An independent evaluation of the CoachBright programme led by ImpactEd provides some tentative evidence of positive effect in relation to attainment, self-efficacy and development of metacognitive skills. The programme has not been independently evaluated at scale and would benefit from a rigorous trial. 

The EEF is working with XTX Markets to support the development and evaluation of secondary mathematics programmes and practices with promising evidence. This project will be part-funded through this initiative.

This programme will be evaluated by RAND Europe and the University of Leeds through a randomised controlled trialAn RCT is used evaluate an educational programme by assigning settings to one of two groups: the intervention group, who receive the programme or the control group, who continue with business as usual. This ensures that any differences in outcomes can be confidently attributed to the programme, providing a robust estimate of the impact and contributing to the evidence for what works in improving educational outcomes.. An implementation and process evaluationAn IPE is used to understand how and why an intervention has (or has not) been successful. Data is analysed to explore programme quality, reach, adaptation and differentiation, as well as setting fidelity and responsiveness to the trial design. will be conducted alongside the impact evaluation, aiming to contextualise the results and explore perceptions of impact, delivery model, and costs to schools.

EEF will be supporting CoachBright to pilot a new school-led model of their programme in 2026 – 2027 to assess evidence of promise, feasibility and readiness for scale. Developing this new model will allow CoachBright to expand their reach and offer varying packages of support for different school budgets.