The Education Endowment Foundation has just released its latest guidance:
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/inclusive-teaching
It seems at first glance to be pretty much an EEF Greatest Hits album – and as such it successfully raised my hackles once again.
EEF purports to be the ‘Gold Standard’ of educational research, but its approach really oversimplifies the complex alchemy that is teaching and learning. To name just one example, its review of interventions and practices have the helpful metric of ‘how many months progress’ one can expect from each programme. Well, maybe I’m missing something, but what exactly is a month’s worth of extra progress? Does this mean a child can be expected to do in November what they otherwise would have only been able to do in December?
What utter nonsense!
But it is lapped up by school leaders up and down the land, as shown by the fact that the EEF is still putting out this ‘guidance’ 15 years after it was set up by Michael Gove.
Don’t get me wrong: the EEF has produced some useful advice over the years. Indeed, if you want to get good National Curriculum test results for your students in Year 6, you can do a lot worse than implementing as many of their ideas as possible.
However, I’d like my dedicated education research team to explore more deeply what a curriculum that truly meets the needs of its students (and society in general) looks like – to be at the cutting edge of stock taking rather than simply recommending different approaches to window dressing. Some will argue that this was the job of the Curriculum and Assessment Review Committee, but they rather dropped the ball as well, in my opinion. We can see the results of the last 12 years of forcing children with a huge variety of strengths and talents through the narrow passage of an overwhelmingly sedentary academic curriculum – disengagement, absence, behaviour challenges, NEETS!
I think it’s time to change the record…
Mike
Please like 👍 and share this post with your friends.
To contact me regarding this post, or purchasing/performing/commissioning music for any occasion, please email me at
contact@mikestubbscomposer.com
Mike Stubbs, Composer 