Research School Network: Evidence-informed practice: why ​‘I’m a teacher’ means more than people think By Victoria Begley, Deputy Director, London South Research School

The responses I get when I tell people that I’m a primary school teacher are many and varied.

Horror: the very idea of spending six-hours a day with 30 (or more) persons under the age of 12 is too much for most rational adults to compute.
Questions I cannot answer: should my child be [insert extremely specific or implausible skill] at the age of [key stage I have no experience of]?
Holiday-based jealousy: no explanation required.

But my least favourite? The low-key professional and intellectual dismissal implied by: ​‘That must be fun, playing with kids all day…’

Teaching is easy, right?

Teaching is a job everyone thinks they can do – especially primary teaching. What knowledge base or skill could possibly be required to show children how to read or add? Everyone can read and add. It’s easy.

But that’s exactly the point. The depth of understanding and range of pedagogical techniques required to teach these essential skills – the ones so automatic you don’t even notice you’re doing them – is nothing short of science.

We as teachers are some of the most cognitively overloaded professionals you could imagine. According to figures originally credited to researcher Philip Jackson, teachers make upwards of 1,500 decisions in a school day. That’s after we’ve reviewed the curriculum, planned the lesson, designed the resources and arranged the seating plan. Throw in some adaptive teaching and a bit of flexible grouping and I think that’s a conservative estimate.

What interests me is, what do we base those decisions on? I suspect it would surprise most ​‘non-teachers’ to know the answer: evidence

Evidence-informed pedagogy

Whatever kind of teacher you are, and whatever stage of your career you’re at, you are using evidence in practice. You might just not know it yet. The ideas might have been filtered through SLT at the September INSET, or the CPD you went on last year, but they all came from somewhere. They are all based on evidence of some kind. And what do we do with those ideas? We try them out in our classrooms – in practice. Some of them work and become staples in our teacher toolkits. Some of them… don’t. It really is that simple.

The biggest shift in my teaching practice came when I stopped waiting for someone to package the evidence into a nearly-wrapped parcel (i.e. a staff meeting) and started seeking it out myself. It sounded intimidating at first, like someone might hand me a pipette and point me in the direction of a Bunsen burner, but all it took was a bit of reading. A book. A blog. Maybe a paper or two. Then someone, somewhere, introduced me to the EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit and my decade-long love affair with educational research really began.

Evidence advocacy: from passive to active

Accessing research evidence directly put the power firmly in my hands as an educator and, as I made way up the career ladder, as a leader. I developed my understanding of good research and, with that, less good research. A critical consumer of evidence can spot the red flags: the companies trying to sell quick-fixes, the correlations that mean nothing and the short-term gains that become long-term pains. Before long, I was the one packaging up the evidence, delivering the staff meeting and implementing the whole-school change.

Now I’m proud to call myself an evidence-informed practitioner and an advocate for research evidence in education. When ​‘playing with kids all day’ really means ​‘shaping the minds of the future’, what we do matters. The 1,500 choices we make per day matter. And the better informed we are when we make those choices, the greater the impact will be.

Join the Evidence Advocacy Certification Programme, a six-part programme starting November 2026, to get to grips with research evidence as a consumer, a practitioner, and an advocate.