CEI is delighted to be working with the Education Endowment Foundation to support the scale-up of three school-based programs. The work is funded under the Department for Education's Accelerator Fund, which aims to support schools to access evidence-informed programs. We'll be supporting three programs which have shown promise in evaluations funded by the EEF, to plan strategies and pathways for scaling. The work will support the spread of effective teaching practice and education recovery following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ensuring that effective approaches are widely available to children and students who need the most help is essential to making meaningful progress in narrowing the attainment gap and helping children and young people to fulfil their potential. But we know that scaling is a particularly challenging aspect of human services. Getting the program right is only the starting point. Supporting scale-up involves paying as much attention to the context and system it operates in as to the program itself.
The three programs we are supporting include:
- Thinking Doing Talking Science - an approach to teaching science in primary schools, developed by Science Oxford and Oxford Brookes University which uses a train the trainer model to equip primary school staff with science teaching techniques and support. We'll be helping the team to determine the optimal 'end game' and pathway for sustainable scale, developing a business model for this intended future state, assessing feasibility and the readiness of the program for scale up.
- Switch On Reading - a 10-week literacy programme for secondary schools, developed by Nottinghamshire County Council. The focus of our work is on strengthening the training and support model through iterative cycles of rapid testing and improvement. We will also be advising on how to monitor the quality of training and of schools' delivery, and on how to embed and sustain Switch on Reading in trained schools.
- Reciprocal Reading - a 12-week primary school reading comprehension programme developed by FFT Literacy. Our work will support the development of a train the trainer model, quality monitoring, and decisions about the optimal long term pathway to scale.
It's a privilege to be working with these innovative program teams to support their ambitions for children's learning, in an aspect of work that doesn't often get the attention it needs. We expect our work to generate rich insight into what it takes to scale up effective education programs which will be of wider value to EEF and to the field as well as to the programs themselves.