Education Endowment Foundation:Our Research Agenda themes and priority areas

Our Research Agenda themes and priority areas

How we commission and fund research.

Overview

About our Research Agenda

Since 2022, we’ve shaped our research funding around a Research Agenda – a roadmap of the key themes and priority areas we want to investigate to improve teaching and learning. This ensures we invest in projects that matter most to schools, colleges, and early years settings – guided by both evidence and real-world priorities.

Our focus is on work that can make the biggest difference for socio-economically disadvantaged children and young people, helping to close the gap between family income and educational achievement.

Our funding rounds focus on specific themes and priority areas that align with our Research Agenda.

Explore our Research Agenda themes

Follow the links below to explore past and upcoming themes, including:

  • why each theme matters to our mission;
  • what the existing evidence in each themes tells us; and
  • the projects we’ve funded so far, and what we’re learning from them.

You can also browse the themes we’ve commissioned research in prior to 2022 here.

Help shape our future research themes

Our Research Agenda is shaped with input from the educator community – through focus groups and other opportunities to share insights from practice.

If you are an educator and you’d like to be part of this, join the EEF Exchange to share your experiences and help guide our future work.