Research School Network: The Evidence-Informed Head A headteacher Q&A series from East London Research School with Lisa and Sophie from Wilbury Primary School

Lisa is Head Teacher at Wilbury Primary School, a school recognised for its strong approaches to leading teaching and learning, tackling disadvantage, and excellence in early years practice. Sophie, the school’s Deputy Head Teacher, is a specialist in early years.

Together, Lisa and Sophie work closely to share their thinking, practice, and leadership approaches with others. They regularly contribute to professional learning through events such as RISE, as well as through collaborative work with the Research Schools Network and Early Excellence.

What’s a recent strength in your school that you’d attribute to strong engagement with research evidence?

We have recently introduced the NCETM’s Mastering Number programme. We were deliberate in grounding this decision in evidence.

Mastering Number deepens pupils’ understanding of the structures of numbers and how to manipulate them: subitising, decomposing and recombining. We felt it offered our pupils strong foundations, and therefore ties into what we think about addressing disadvantage. Of course, it’s key that you have someone really strong in the school to lead the implementation of the programme, and we’ve ensured our staff have a really secure understanding of what they’re doing.

What strategies have helped you keep workload manageable during periods of implementation?

It’s all about keeping it simple. If something new is introduced, something else must be removed!
We’ve tried to work with our staff to figure this out. For example, we asked staff to include more teaching of handwriting, and took their suggestions about aspects of the wider curriculum to review if we want to prioritise getting those basics right.

Open dialogue with staff is essential. Teachers need space to say, ​“This isn’t feasible alongside everything else we’re being asked to do.” That feedback is not resistance; it is professional insight. Leadership has to genuinely value it.

I think senior leadership teams do need the confidence to be self-directed. We too can feel like, ​“Oh! There’s another priority!” But we have to have the confidence to say ​“We are prioritising this, which means we cannot do that.” What we’re realising more and more is that it is the strong foundations that must be prioritised.

We try to keep the message to staff simple: we are in this together.

Reflecting on previous experiences of applying or cascading research, what are your key lessons learned?

The most significant lesson is this: never assume. You can introduce things, you can explain things, you can do training, you can do the CPD. But that doesn’t mean you can assume it’s going to be happening in the classroom – even after all of that!

Therefore you have to constantly revisit the message and really make sure you are in and out of the classrooms to make sure what you think is going on, is going on.

One example of where we made incorrect assumptions about practice was with our teaching of reading. Over time, we had added enhancements to our teaching informed by emerging research. When outcomes did not meet expectations, lesson observations revealed that teachers were attempting to do everything – old practices and new – resulting in inefficiency and wasted time. We had assumed that staff would know what to stop doing and we simply hadn’t communicated this explicitly enough.

Which areas of research are you most interested in exploring next?

Attendance is a current focus – and a big part of our disadvantage strategy. In particular, we are interested in research around communication with parents – how we can keep it simple, how boundaries and support are balanced. Can we check with families that our communication approaches are actually working? It’s great that there is a much larger evidence base around improving attendance that we’ll be able to draw from than perhaps a few years ago.

As leaders with expertise in EYFS, what role do you think evidence has in helping accelerate progress, or close gaps, in early years?

Well, for us the evidence base has been really helpful in helping validate some of the thinking we’ve done about high quality interactions, play and metacognition. For example, we’re often reminding staff of the importance of narrating children’s thoughts because they don’t yet have the vocabulary. The research evidence has also sharpened our approach – for example, in the difference between interacting and interfering!
I’d argue that the evidence base has strengthened our communication and practice about areas of good practice that felt right, felt instinctive.

In this column, Lisa and Sophie highlighted the importance of developing strong foundations in early number. Early mathematics is incredibly important for children’s development. Positive early experiences and achievement in mathematics lay the foundations for future learning: research evidence indicates that children’s early mathematics skills are the strongest predictor of later outcomes. However, gaps emerge early, particularly for children from low-income backgrounds and underserved communities. High-quality teaching really matters and should be our priority for all children, however, some children will need additional support in the form of targeted interventions to make progress. East London Research School have developed an innovative intervention using mathematical picture books to support children in Reception who need additional support to develop a secure understanding of number. This consists of 10 weeks of targeted small-group sessions using shared book reading to engage children and promote sustained, high-quality conversations about mathematical ideas using carefully selected picture books.

Excitingly, we are now recruiting schools to join an inspiring, potentially ground-breaking efficacy trial. We’d love more schools to sign up and join us in the pioneering research. There are many good reasons to do so! If you are interested, you can find out more information here