The Accelerator Fund was part of the Government’s investment in education recovery and was focused on literacy and numeracy programmes.
Settings in England were able to take part in evidence-based programmes – funded through the Accelerator Fund – at all stages of their development. These included:
- Trials of innovative approaches that showed promise in raising pupil attainment.
- Scale-up of programmes that were proven in an EEF trial to raise pupil attainment.
In total, around 5000 schools and settings benefitted from access to Accelerator Fund funded programmes between 2021 and 2025, benefiting an estimated 650,000 pupils. This included around 2,300 settings and ~480,000 pupils gaining subsidised access to highly effective programmes through the fund’s scale up activity. The fund focused on addressing the barriers effective programmes face reaching national scale, and generating evidence in this area.
Projects funded by Accelerator Fund can be seen at the bottom of this page.
Programmes often face common challenges as they scale, and we know that if the scaling process is not conducted effectively, this can reduce impact. As part of Accelerator Fund activity, we commissioned capability building work to support delivery teams at the scale up stage of our pipeline with challenges they face in scaling, See key outputs for delivery teams from our capability and scaling work here.
The EEF’s early- stage programme development work was initially set up in 2021 via the Accelerator Fund to support the design of new and developing programmes with the potential to support children and young people to improve their outcomes and to help reduce the attainment gap between socio-economically disadvantaged pupils and their classmates. This work provides support to help create potentially promising programmes for future evaluation, with the long term aim of building the supply of high quality, evidenced programmes available for settings to access to raise attainment. For more information on our early stage programme development work and the early-stage programmes that we have funded see: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/early-stage-programme-development
Press release
Three things we’ve learned from the independent evaluation of our Accelerator Fund activity
