Research School Network: EEF Announces New Work to Facilitate and Support Evidence-based Practice Accelerator Fund for the North, East Midlands and Humber, and the West Midlands

Press Release


EEF Announces New Work to Facilitate and Support Evidence-based Practice

Accelerator Fund for the North, East Midlands and Humber, and the West Midlands


Yesterday, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) announced further plans to support the use of evidence-based teaching practice in English schools.

This academic year, EEF will expand its work to ensure that there is a quality supply of evidence-informed programmes for school leaders to access and implement in their settings. The Department for Education will support this expansion for the duration of 2021 – 22 through the Accelerator Fund.

The funding will support the development of suppliers of evidence-based practice, with delivery focused on the North, East Midlands & Humber, West Midlands. This will build on the EEF’s work over the past decade, in evaluating educational programmes and disseminating lessons from the evidence nationally.

This 12-month initiative will work towards three key objectives:

Building a pipeline of evidence-based programmes

Existing programmes shown to be effective in previous EEF Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) will be scaled up and extended, including to schools in areas where these programmes have not previously been available.

The EEF network of Research Schools will support local engagement with these programmes, and will also work with the EEF and with other schools in the three regions to develop new programmes, based on evidence of approaches that positively impact pupil progress.

Support schools to make effective use of educational evidence in their setting


A bespoke training programme will be developed and delivered by the Research School Network, to support other schools in diagnosing areas for development in their setting, identifying possible improvement strategies, and implementing these successfully.

Evaluation of the initiative


This work will be robustly evaluated through an overall evaluation, as well as rapid-cycle testing, standard EEF efficacy trials, standard EEF effectiveness trials and the collection of Monitoring and Implementation data.

Professor Becky Francis, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, said:

“We know teachers and school leaders are keen to engage with evidence and implement practices that are supported by the wider research base for the benefit of their pupils.“This is a hugely exciting opportunity for us build on the foundations we have laid together, and further ingrain evidence use in English classrooms.“In the long-term this initiative will broaden schools’ access to programmes with the potential to make a real, positive difference to pupils’ attainment.”

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