Research School Network: Three ways to use an EEF Guidance Report Make the most of Guidance Reports using these techniques

Engaging with evidence has the potential to improve our schools. It also offers other benefits, including strengthening teachers’ professional identity. However, engaging with the debates around evidence can be bewildering. It can be hard to know who to listen to, who to trust, and who to ignore.

Fortunately, the EEF’s Guidance Reports are a fantastic starting point for engaging with research because how they are produced makes them trustworthy, as described in last week’s blog. This blog describes three ways to get the most out of Guidance Reports.

Audit existing practice

When making evidence-informed decisions, understanding your own context is just as important as understanding the evidence. Audit tools can help you understand how your current practice compares to the evidence. An example audit tool linked to the Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants Guidance Report is a good example. One caution is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Therefore, it is common to initially overrate existing practice without fully appreciating what excellence looks like.

In addition to auditing your existing practice against the evidence, it is also important to audit your readiness for change. This includes the foundations of good implementation such as a climate where teachers feel trusted to try new things and make mistakes, safe in the knowledge that they will be supported to try again and improve. Further, there are some specific questions that you should ask about the fit and feasibility of your approach. For instance:

• Do the values and norms of the intervention align with ours?
• Are we able to make the necessary changes to existing processes and structures, such as timetables or team meetings?
• Crucially, what can we stop doing to free up space, time, and effort?

Study groups

One of the striking findings from our training programmes is how valued the time to carefully read about the evidence around a topic can be. We often include focused time for reading and discussion as part of a programme because we know how hard it is for busy teachers to otherwise find the opportunity. However, in the same way that collaborative learning requires more than just sitting pupils together, it is important to think carefully about how to structure approaches to reading and discussing evidence.

If you’re thinking about working with colleagues on a guidance report, then I recommend reading this protocol developed by colleagues from the Research Schools Network.

Our top tips include:

• Allow plenty of time to allow everyone to get into the detail and relate it to their own experiences.
• Create a trusting environment where everyone’s voice matters. If this is not already present, you will need to consider how to develop it.
• Integrate the evidence with your professional judgement, but be open-minded about ideas that may challenge your views and experiences.

Engage with training

Making the most of the Guidance Reports is challenging to do alone – for instance, it can be very easy to simply think ​‘we’re already doing that’. Collaborating with others is likely to be beneficial, especially where there is expert challenge and support. One way to receive this is by engaging in structured training programmes offered by the Research Schools Network.

At Shotton Hall Research School, we offer three types of programmes:

• Taster sessions, such as our free twilights this term, which provide an introduction to key topics linked to a Guidance Report.
• Extended training programmes, which typically occur over three days and result in a concrete output, such as an updated Pupil Premium strategy or an action plan for professional development.
• Bespoke programmes co-developed with partners based on the best-available evidence. These partners might be individual schools or groups of schools.

If you’d like to find out more about how you can make the most of Guidance Reports – including getting hard copies of the reports – please get in touch.