The Regional Implementation Leads pilot (RIL pilot) – led by a partnership of the EEF, West Somerset Research School and Bristol City Council – aimed to develop and test an approach to support schools in building the culture, capacity, and capability to successfully implement and sustain evidence-informed school improvement and support progress towards establishing a city-wide evidence-informed ecosystem via regional implementation leads (RILs).
In line with the EEF’s mission, the main targets for the pilot were schools with the highest levels of disadvantage in Bristol (identified in this project as priority schools), with the aim to enable these schools to apply evidence-informed implementation processes through a package of training, workshops, and additional resources.
The initial stage of the pilot involved co-construction of the RIL role, an associated competency framework, and the Developing Effective Leadership of Teaching Assistants (DELTA) programme, as well as the recruitment and training of ten RILs. Development work continued over the duration of the pilot. The DELTA programme is a package of training, support, and resources that takes a staged approach to enabling schools to deploy the evidence-informed processes set out in the EEF’s TA implementation guidance, Making the Best Use of Teaching Assistants (Sharples et al., 2019). The DELTA programme comprised a launch event and eight workshops led by EEF programme leaders and West Somerset Research School, five ‘sense-making clinics’ for clusters of approximately ten schools led by RILs, and tailored ‘wraparound support’ by RILs to enable individual schools to make, and act on, evidence-informed decisions in line with the implementation and TA guidance. The remaining schools in Bristol were invited to join the DELTA workshops and sense-making clinics alongside the priority schools.
Previous research suggests that research use is not well embedded in all schools which in turn impacts school practices and outcomes for disadvantaged pupils. For the EEF, supporting schools, early years settings and colleges use of research evidence to inform practice is central to the mission to raise attainment and close the disadvantage gap. The findings from this pilot will play a part in informing the next phase of the EEF’s regional strategy, which aims to foster sustained partnerships with local authorities and multi academy trusts.
The independent evaluation of the pilot was led by a team from Sheffield Hallam University, who aimed to find out how feasible the pilot was to deliver, what evidence there was to support the theory of change, and whether the RIL role is ready for scale-up.
The mixed-methods evaluation had both formative and summative purposes. Baseline and follow-up surveys of senior leaders were primarily used to gather data on change over time. Qualitative data generation included interviews with RILs, school implementation leads, senior leaders, and stakeholders at different timepoints during the pilot and six school case studies at the end. The design of data collection instruments, the analytical framework, and the final synthesis of findings were based on the nested logic models co-constructed by the evaluators and EEF programme leads.
A report indicating the findings and the further appendices documents can be found here: