With the aid of a new multimillion-dollar government grant, schools, universities, and early childhood settings will conduct experiments and treatments designed to boost academic achievement.
The Department for Education will continue financing the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) with a fresh grant of £137 million, solidifying the independent charity’s major position in the education scene for at least the next decade.
The EEF will continue to assist the government’s reforms of teacher training while extending its early childhood activities. This includes serving as the evidence partner for the Early Years Stronger Practice Hubs, which are scheduled to open in November 2022. These hubs will exchange good evidence-based practises with local settings in an effort to promote the development of young children.
In addition, the government is investing an additional £66 million for the Accelerator Fund’s next phase, which will boost access to high-quality reading and numeracy programmes in schools over the next three academic years. This is part of the government’s commitment to ensure that children who fall behind in math or English get the necessary assistance to catch up.
As part of this, the EEF will receive up to £41,500,000 to continue accumulating evidence surrounding good programmes, scale up current programmes, and provide implementation assistance to schools. Up to £21 million of the cash will also be used to assist Maths and English Hubs in implementing high-quality programmes in schools.
Schools Minister, Will Quince, said:
“The re-endowment of the EEF, in addition to funding to continue the Accelerator Fund, will provide the evidence base that allows schools and teachers to give children the best start to their education.
“This work, in addition to our ambitious education recovery plan, will help to improve the attainment of millions of pupils and level up opportunities across the country.”
Over the past decade, the EEF has conducted over 200 evaluations to determine the most effective interventions and approaches for closing the attainment gap, involving 23,000 nurseries, schools, and colleges in trials and reaching over 1.8 million children, including 500,000 pupils eligible for free school meals.
The financing announced today for the Accelerator Fund follows a successful first year of the project, during which the EEF sponsored 20 programmes in over 1,500 settings, including those in areas that sustained considerable learning loss during the epidemic. Some of these initiatives included ‘Reciprocal Reading,’ an intense small-group curriculum for 12-16-year-olds designed to increase reading comprehension, and ‘1stClass@Number,’ which assisted 6–7-year-olds with poor arithmetic achievement in improving their abilities.
The English Hubs and Maths Hubs programmes also contributed to the delivery of phonics and numeracy programmes to nearly 5,000 schools. As part of the continued financing provided today, these programmes will continue to be rolled out to other schools in response to high demand. For further information, schools may contact their regional hub.
Areas with a high number of children from disadvantaged families will continue to be given priority for programmes designed to raise achievement levels.
Sir Peter Lampl, chair of the EEF since its inception, said:
“Over the past decade, the EEF has built a reputation as a trusted and independent source of evidence. The new endowment will allow us to continue to evaluate and spread best practice across the country, as well as expand our work in the early years sector.
“High-quality evidence plays an important role in supporting education practitioners’ own professional judgement, as they work to make sure that every child and young person has access to a great education.”
These efforts are part of the government’s ambitious, almost $5 billion education recovery strategy. This includes £1.5 billion for a national tutoring revolution, which has already launched over two million high-quality tutoring courses. A £1 billion Recovery Premium also helps some of the nation’s most disadvantaged students make up for missed learning.
The re-endowment of the EEF for £137 million is in addition to the approximately £40 million left from the EEF’s initial endowment. The £66 million in funding for the next phase of the Accelerator Fund includes up to £41.5 million for the EEF, up to £21 million for Maths and English Hubs, up to £3 million for a procured supplier to provide capability building support to scale-up programmes, and up to £500,000 for an evaluation of the EEF component of the Accelerator Fund programme.