‘Time to review’ sidelining of education faculties in research

The decision to divert millions of pounds of education research spending from UK universities into studies overseen by an independent charity should be revisited because there is insufficient evidence to suggest the shift has helped improve educational outcomes in British schools, scholars claim.

UK government funding for research done by education departments within universities has fallen substantially since 2013, with ministers instead favouring supporting research overseen by third parties.

The Education Endowment Foundation (EFF), which was founded in 2011 to identify and fund innovations to help disadvantaged pupils, is one charity that has benefitted substantially from the shift, a recent study by the British Educational Research Association (Bera) highlighted.

Its initial £137 million endowment lasting 15 years was renewed for a similar amount in 2022 to allow it to “continue its work as an independent evidence broker, evaluating and spreading best practice across English schools”.

Although the charity’s funding has been strong, research budgets in education faculties have faced a “significant decline”, explains the Bera study. Annual funding from the Research Excellence Framework (REF) has declined by about £12 million between REF 2014 and REF 2021, a drop of 17 per cent, while direct funding from UK government fell by about 36 per cent between 2013 and 2021 to about £12 million a year.

More recently, direct funding from the Economic and Social Research Council has fallen sharply, with just 21 grants or fellowships worth a total of £5.6 million in 2024, compared with 44 awards worth £15 million in 2021.

EEF was part of the creation of a “pluralistic” ecosystem of organisations designed to “improve innovation and efficiency” but the diversity of research actors has had its downsides, claims the report.

“Tracing the connections and motivations of networks that operate in education is now more complex than it was” and there are “fewer formal and institutional structures, and regular events scaffolding those interactions”, it says.

Moreover, although peer-reviewed journal papers provided “high-quality public-facing information on education research conducted in universities, this is not always the case when it comes to that conducted by other kinds of organisation”, says the report.

“If you look at the evidence for the effectiveness of this research – that it is producing better outcomes than ‘business as usual’ – then it’s sparse,” report author David James, emeritus professor of sociology of education at Cardiff University, told Times Higher Education.

“If you look at these rigorous large-scale randomised control trials that the EEF favours, then they are often uninformative,” said James, citing a 2019 study that found “very few” of the 141 trials undertaken at that point had delivered “sizeable benefits”.

Addressing this criticism, a spokesperson for the EEF said that “to ensure the findings are relevant, our randomised controlled trials typically compare programmes with ‘business as usual’, because this reflects the real choices teachers and school leaders face”.

“In these cases, finding no difference can still be an important result, as this tells us that both approaches perform equally well, or that investing in a programme to change current practice will not lead to improvements for pupils.”

The Bera report also examines the EEF’s “brokerage” model, in which existing research is summarised and presented in a digestible way via toolkits and guidance reports.

This promoted a “narrow and decontextualised approach to using research”, in which teachers become “consumers” of research rather than active participants in research themselves, it says.

“There are plenty of grounds to review the balance in the current ecosystem,” said James, who questioned the current emphasis on knowledge dissemination and instead stressed the importance of knowledge creation via original research.

According to the EEF’s latest impact report, one in five UK teachers have taken part in a professional development programme that has used EEF-backed evidence, and its toolkits summarising information on nearly 3,000 research studies are accessed by 434,000 users a year.

The EEF spokesperson said its work is “focused on supporting schools, colleges and early years settings to use evidence in ways that really make a difference for disadvantaged pupils...to do this, our research has to be both rigorous and relevant to practice”.

“To ensure rigour, all of our research is competitively commissioned,” the spokesperson continued, adding that “independent evaluations of our programmes are tendered from a panel that includes universities and other leading research organisations, and every study undergoes independent peer review at multiple stages”.

With studies also informing schools about the likely cost of implementing research recommendations, the EEF’s findings “help schools understand the scale of impact they can realistically expect, and provide a counterbalance to programmes or approaches that may be popular but may not be more effective than existing practice”, the report concludes.

However, with a National Audit Office 2024 report stating the educational outcomes for disadvantaged children had widened since 2011, it was important to consider whether the schooling interventions promoted via the EEF are working effectively, said James.

“The Department for Education needs to be monitoring interventions to see if they’re working or not. We need to know if the claims made for the research promoted by the EEF are evidence-based,” he said, adding: “There’s enough evidence to suggest many of the interventions have been largely ineffective.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com