Research School Network: Unpacking a School’s Guide to Implementation Part 2: Explore

The new EEF guidance reportPutting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementationoffers six recommendations to help schools give their innovations the very best chance by working carefully through the who, why, where, when and how of managing change. Over a series of blog posts, we are exploring those recommendations. Our previous post looked at the first two recommendations – about the foundations for good implementation – and in this post we look at the third:

Define the problem you want to solve and identify appropriate programmes or practices to implement

Out of six recommendations, four are about what happens before an intervention is put in place. This goes somewhat against the grain of how implementation can be carried out in schools, where an intervention is decided and then everything is put in place to support it. This is often a consequence of the high stakes involved in leading a school – we always have to be doing things. However, the ​‘explore’ stage, where the focus is on choosing the intervention, is as crucial as the implementation itself.

Most schools choose interventions because they look like they will work. Many of the things schools choose to bring in are things that actually do work, or have worked, elsewhere. Yet one of the most important things that schools must remember is to keep everything as specific to their own context as possible. Something which works well in another context may not work in yours. That’s why taking a package or activity and simply replicating it and hoping for general improved outcomes is not going to work. Even if a thing does work, it might not be addressing a need in the school, or not a need of priority.

This need can be identified from a range of sources: ​“The analysis of questions from national tests or diagnostic standardised tests can help pinpoint specific areas of need. In addition to examining pupil-level information, data on staffing, resources, and stakeholder perceptions should also be considered.” The need needs to be specific, rather than general. ​‘Improving literacy’ is not a need, nor even ​‘improving reading’, when this could mean a number of factors.

Once the specific need is established, the goal is to decide on the intervention. The EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit, Guidance Reports and Promising Projects can all be used to help refine what you might implement. The Implementation Guide suggests asking these questions:

• How have similar problems been tackled before in similar locations to mine?
• How strong is the evidence behind the approach?
• Is it cost effective?

These are questions that we hope Bradford Research School can support schools with too. Increasingly, as we work with schools across the city, we are seeing examples of excellent practice. The more schools that share how they are using evidence based practice, the more we can point other schools towards them. For example, in recent weeks, we have heard of excellent use of cognitive science to support teaching and learning from Skipton Girls High School, we have heard how Bradford Girls Grammar School are using the EEF Making Best use of Teaching Assistants guidance report as an integral part of their provision and an evidence based approach to literacy from Copthorne Primary School.

The Implementation Guide includes regular questions that can help you to refine interventions. Here are the checklist questions for this recommendation:

• Are we confident we have identified a strong school improvement priority that is amenable to change?
• What are we looking to achieve by adopting a new programme or practice?
• Have we systematically identified the right approach to achieve these goals?
• Is there reliable evidence it can have the desired impact, if implemented well?
• Is it feasible within our context?

There are definitely no silver bullets when it comes to education, but making better decisions about the innovations we make in school is surely better than starting from gut feelings and optimism.

Next: Part 3: Prepare