How Should A Government Be?: The New Levers of State Power by Jaideep Prabhu

Author:Jaideep Prabhu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

What Works in education?

Kevan Collins began his professional life as a primary school teacher in East London in the 1980s before going on to run schools and work for the central government as national director of the Primary Literacy Strategy. He then went back to East London as director of children’s services in Tower Hamlets, one of the UK’s most deprived communities, before becoming chief executive of the Tower Hamlets council from 2009 to 2011. ‘At the council,’ Collins says, ‘I was struck by the large number of decisions in a whole array of public services that we had to make without really having a clear set of rigorous options in front of us. People did put forward options, but they were ideas rather than evidenced choices.’34

Earlier in his career, Collins had completed a PhD involving a quantitative study of bilingualism and literacy. This experience exposed him to the power of using data to test hypotheses and assemble evidence for what works and what doesn’t. Without such data and testing, he realised, on the basis of theory alone, it was hard to decide whether bilingualism (for instance) was a good or bad thing for educational outcomes, and whether it was therefore something that policymakers should encourage or not. So, when the government announced a competition to allocate £125 million to support efforts to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children in English schools, he took immediate notice. ‘Traditionally,’ he says, ‘this money would have been spent on people with an idea constructing a strategy and then going out and doing it. But I put in a proposal not to do that but to use evidence instead to inform the decision-making.’

Collins became involved in the conversation and this eventually led to him becoming the first CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation.

‘Our proposition was that, in England, similar schools with similar children and similar resources experience a huge variation in outcomes. We know that this is because different people make different decisions. But how then can we know what is effective and collect that information in ways that others can verify and use?’ So, this was what Collins and his team set out to do. The idea was to go from compliance and uninformed professionalism to informed professionalism. Surprisingly, this had not been the tradition in education until then. ‘Education had not been scientific or rigorous,’ says Collins.

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) is a small organisation of twenty-five people that does three things, all in partnership with others. First, it maintains a toolkit that synthesises evidence of what works in education worldwide in terms of teaching 5- to 16-year-olds. The toolkit covers thirty or so key themes, including the impact of homework, one-to-one tuition and parental involvement. It uses a simple scale to summarise the cost of each activity, the strength of evidence regarding its effectiveness, and its impact on learning outcomes in terms of a common metric: the number of additional months of progress that it gives children. The toolkit is digital and

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