65% of Senior Leaders who responded to the Engaging with Evidence survey cited Education Endowment Foundation guidance as their most trusted source of advice.
It is great that EEF guidance is being used, but in a series of posts, we’re asking: what does it take to use this guidance well?
EEF guidance reports are useful, practical and accessible summaries of the evidence. But they are not the final word – they are the start of the conversation. We need to go a little beyond the surface. In doing so, we understand more of the evidence, the decisions made, the hidden nuance.
How do they create guidance reports?
A guidance report starts with a scoping exercise, where teachers, policy-makers, academics and other stakeholders identify important issues for teaching practice. There has to be a need that the guidance report addresses.
An independent research team then conducts a literature review. This will examine the best available evidence and will often include a review of current practice. For example, the updated implementation guidance took into account the use of the previous guidance.
They work with a panel of teachers and academics to turn the academic piece into practical, accessible, jargon-free recommendations.
At every stage, decisions are made that will affect the final report. Fortunately, we can usually go behind the curtain and see how these decisions are made.
How did they create this guidance report?
There will be uniqueness in how the teams approach each new guidance report. This will depend on the review team, the expert panel, the topic and the available evidence. While we can’t capture every decision made, you can often read much into the accompanying evidence summaries.
A great example is the Evidence to Decision Framework which accompanies the updated implementation guidance: “The EtD framework helps ensure that decisions are transparent, consistent, and based on the best available evidence.”
For each recommendation, you can read a discussion of the evidence that supports it, focusing on the priority of the problem; benefits and harms; certainty of the evidence; transferability; balance; resource use; equity; acceptability; feasibility. You read, for example, about a concern that the new recommendations of the guidance report might be overshadowed by the inclusion of the familiar explore-prepare-deliver-sustain cycle:
There is a potential risk that the structured process outlined in Recommendation 3 may overshadow Recommendations 1 and 2, particularly due to its perceived familiarity to individuals who used the former guidance report. To mitigate this risk, we have endeavoured to ensure that the process translates the concepts outlined in Recommendations 1 and 2 into operational practices. For instance, at the heart of the Explore phase, lies the key contextual factors and behaviours that drive effective implementation.
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A School’s Guide to Implementation Guidance Report Evidence to Decision Framework
The broad recommendations in guidance reports, and specific recommendations for practice, are not plucked from thin air. We can track them back to a foundation in research evidence.
You’ll find the references that support recommendations at the end of every guidance report. They are usually the most helpful next step to understand the evidence. Frustratingly, they are not always accessible for free, but many are. While some of the references are for other EEF resources, it’s also helpful to build a picture that goes beyond the EEF.
In the Improving Literacy in Key stage 2 Guidance report, we see this statement in the section on reading comprehension strategies: “The effectiveness of teaching pupils to integrate multiple strategies is well supported by research evidence and this approach is likely to be more effective than relying on single strategies in isolation.”
The reference takes me to National Reading Panel (2000): ‘Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction: Reports of the Subgroups’, a comprehensive summary of the evidence in reading instruction. Read here. It’s quite long, so we might dip into relevant sections, but now we are building an evidence picture beyond that line of text.
The EEF guidance reports are brilliant, and I find new insights from them every time I reread them, but go a little below the surface and you’ll find a goldmine.
You can find many of the evidence and practice reviews that accompany guidance reports (and some that stand alone) here.
