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29 January, 2024 —
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Blog one | Evidence Generation by the EEF

EEF Projects: A Blog Series by Cornwall Research School

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by Cornwall Research School
on the 29th January 2024

John Rodgers

Director of Cornwall Research School

John has been a teacher for 24 years, the last 19 in Cornwall. He currently works as an Assistant Principal at Mounts Bay Academy, Penzance and Content Lead for Secondary Literacy for RS Network. Click here to read more.

Luca Owenbridge

Deputy Director of Cornwall Research School

Luca Owenbridge is History and Maths teacher based in Penzance, Cornwall. He came to teaching after working as a Policy Analyst for the Department for Education in London. Click here to read more.

🎧 Listen to Recruitment Series 1 of 6 on Podbean 🎧

“The Education Endowment Foundation is an independent charity dedicated to breaking the link between family income and education achievement. At the EEF, we support schools, nurseries, and colleges to improve teaching and learning for 2- to 19-year-olds through better use of evidence.”(1)

The EEF do this using a three-pronged approach:

Evidence Synthesis

Evidence Mobilisation

Evidence Generation

Evidence Synthesis is about summarising the evidence; reviewing the best available evidence on teaching and learning and presenting it in an accessible way. This synthesis may be presented in the form of the Teaching and Learning Toolkits^2,3or Guidance Reports⁴.

Evidence Mobilisation concerns putting evidence to use; supporting education practitioners, as well as policymakers and other organisations, to use evidence in ways that improve teaching and learning. The Research School Network plays a key role in evidence mobilisation.

Evidence Generation is finding new evidence; funding independent evaluations of programmes and approaches that aim to raise the attainment of children and young people from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and supporting those that do to work at scale.

The EEF approach to evidence generation is as follows:

The EEF fund ideas that:

Focus on raising outcomes to narrow the socio-economic attainment gap.
Build on existing evidence or widespread practice.
Can be scaled up cost-effectively if shown to work.

The EEF focus on robust evaluation:

Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) or QEDs.
Independent evaluations.
Separation of developers and evaluators.

The EEF research agenda aims to:

Identify programmes around priority themes or questions.
Fill gaps in the evidence base.
Find approaches with the potential to support disadvantaged pupils’ progress.

‘The EEF is funding more randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in education than any other organisation globally. The EEF has more than doubled the amount of available evidence from trials in education in this country and has commissioned more than 10 per cent of all known trials in education around the world.

The EEF’s approach to evaluation has been instrumental in raising the bar in terms of the quality of education research in the UK, proving that large-scale, robust, quantitative trials of programmes in schools, nurseries and colleges are possible.

We publish, openly and in full, the independent evaluation reports of all EEF-funded projects, no matter what the outcomes, so that teachers can have confidence in the findings we present.’⁵

To find out more about the projects that the EEF are currently funding visit the EEF website here Projects | EEF (educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk)

To explore projects that are currently recruiting in your area, visit Take part in an EEF project | EEF (educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk)

This was blog 1 of 6 in our series exploring EEF projects.