Research School Network: What does effective intervention look like? Durrington ELE Tara McVey explores the EEF’s recently published Making a Difference with Effective Tutoring guidance report

We would all agree that high quality teaching is our most powerful tool for ensuring student progress. But it is also simply a fact that in our post-Covid world there are some children who need something more that we can offer in classrooms.

However, it is vital that, any time we remove a pupil from their classroom, what we offer them has to be better, higher quality, more effective at closing their particular gap. Otherwise it is simply a waste of both time and effort.

So, how do we ensure interventions are effective? The EEF has recently released a report which outlines the key principles around how we might make a difference with effective tutoring.

They identify three key principles which support the implementation of one-to-one and small group tutoring in a way that is likely to be most impactful.

These key principles are:

1. Selecting pupils and scheduling sessions effectively
2. Aligning tutoring with curriculum and assessment
3. Creating a sustainable tutoring model

Selecting pupils and scheduling sessions effectively

The EEF guide gives a definition of tuition where ​‘pupils are supported with additional and intensive academic learning, targeted at specific needs. Understanding of learning gaps is key, in order to select appropriate curriculum content.’

Understanding learning gaps is vital. Real understanding. There are moments in schools where discussions around effective interventions focus on which programme to use, on what has been seen to be effective elsewhere. The problem with starting there is that it starts with a solution that has no problem. We need to turn this narrative on its head and focus on diagnosis.

Ideally, the diagnosis will inform the selection of pupils, rather than the other way round, where we select pupils and then try to diagnose what they might need. In addition, there is no fool proof assessment that will tell us everything we need to know about where learning gaps might be. Instead, we have to triangulate data from a range of sources that will allow us to pinpoint specifically what a student might need additional support to know or be able to do. This blog from Shotton Hall Research School offers a fantastic example of using diagnostic assessments to guide reading interventions. And this from the EEF offers a process for considering the credibility and validity of the data that we gather.

Assessment, not assumption is key here.

The second aspect of this is around the scheduling of sessions. Here, knowledge of your students and your context is key. Essentially, the smaller the group, the more effectively the provision can target the specific needs you’ve identified, although groups of up to three still appear to maintain relatively high impact, as long as the need is homogeneous across the students selected. But, as well as considering group size, you need to think about how you ensure buy in so that students will attend positively (and on time). If you are taking students out of lessons, you may consider rotating their timetable so that the impact on the curriculum of individual subjects is minimised, in which case, what will you do to ensure that students remember and turn up?

Aligning tutoring with curriculum and assessment

The second of the key principles is that tuition is most likely to be effective when well matched with a pupils’ current curriculum, so that classroom practice reinforces the learning from tuition sessions. So, here, setting up clear means of communication between your tutor and the classroom teacher is vital.

And the diagnostic assessment process needs to continue. It cannot be simply that we diagnose need at the start and then run a ​‘one size fits all’ tutoring programme. The tutor would need to think about how to continue that process; how might they use formative assessment practices in sessions to identify pupil misconceptions, to check for understanding and then to use this information to target future intervention sessions.

The EEF guide to Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning gives some useful examples of what ​‘eliciting evidence of learning’ might look like in the classroom, focusing on effective questioning, response systems where all students answer, and carefully designed tasks which provide evidence of what a pupil is thinking. The Effective Tutoring guidance gives some additional information on the use of Hinge Questions which are designed to pinpoint understanding and specific misconceptions. How can you ensure your tutor has a really sound understanding of using these strategies in practice?

Creating a sustainable tutoring model

The final principle is around making any tutoring or intervention model sustainable so that we can monitor and evaluate impact effectively.

One key issue with interventions in schools is that we will often simply measure impact on one parameter within the intervention itself, for example, a vocabulary intervention that uses a baseline test at the start and end, where success is simply measured on whether the test score at the end is higher than it was at the start. Or success is measured in terms of task completion – the intervention took place therefore that is success.

In order to truly think about whether our intervention is impactful, we need to be looking to evaluate it – not default to trying to prove that our time (and money) has been well spent. Therefore evaluation must be separate from accountability. We need to look for evidence of impact on pupil outcomes going forward, not simply within the intervention itself.

Therefore, we need to think about the wide range of monitoring that we could undertake in order to identify challenges, potential difficulties and adapt practice as a result. And how we might monitor future, sustained impact beyond the life of the intervention itself. That monitoring can take many forms: from what we see in the classroom; to feedback from staff, pupils and parents; to attendance data, work samples and assessment data. More than anything, we need to be honest about what the data tells us – and act on it.

We started with the idea that, if we are offering a pupil something other than their normal classroom learning, we need to be certain that what they’re getting is even better for them. Ultimately, that is how we can make a difference.

Tara McVey