Education Endowment Foundation:Promising Programmes

Promising Programmes

Programmes we’ve tested that show promise for raising attainment.

When you’re considering how to embed evidence into your school, you might consider evidence based approaches, such as the findings from the Toolkit on feedback, phonics or metacognition; or our guidance on best practices in education. Alongside these approaches, you may also need to identify evidence-based programmes to support high-quality teaching, targeted academic support or wider school strategies.

Here you can find the programmes we’ve tested that have shown promising results on pupil attainment, find out about the features of the programme and how you can access them.

We have a sequential model of evidence generation, where if we find a promising impact from a trial under best possible conditions (efficacy level), we may run a larger trial to test the impact of a programme at a larger scale (effectiveness level).

All of our Promising Programmes have been independently evaluated at either efficacy or effectiveness level, and shown promise for raising attainment. Some of the programmes we are currently testing at a larger scale, and we will continue to add new evaluated programmes that show promise, so the list will change over time as the most recent evidence becomes available.

This resource is not aimed to be used as a selection list. Instead, school and setting leaders should combine evidence — both from school-based data and through critical evaluation of external research evidence — to identify school priorities and identify promising approaches. As with all evidence, your professional judgment and knowledge of your context will inform how transferable these approaches are to your setting.

Once a solution is identified, careful consideration needs to be given to how they are implemented. Our guidance on effective implementation is a useful starting point.