In the EEF’s first decade, our evaluation activity focused primarily on existing programmes. We wanted to understand whether a programme had the potential to support schools and teachers to improve outcomes for socio-economically disadvantaged pupils. We’ve learnt – and continue to learn – a lot from this. But it also became increasingly clear that there were areas of practice with promising evidence where there just weren’t enough programmes available to help schools and other education settings put them to use. As we increased our understanding of the evidence around professional development and implementation , we wanted to help fill these evidence-to-practice gaps by supporting the development of new programmes.
In 2022, we launched our early-stage programme development (ESPD) stream of work. Since then, we’ve supported more than 75 new projects at the innovation and development stages of our programmes pipeline. Today, we’ve published a short guide, which distils some of the key principles from this emerging area of our work.
Our ESPD work was set up to help build evidence into programme design, particularly in the areas of professional development and implementation. To do this, we fund developers to design and/or refine their programme using a Theory of Change (ToC), deliver their programme to a small number of settings (five to 12), and capture formative feedback from practitioners. The ultimate aim of this is to help create potentially promising, evidence-based programmes that are ready for delivery at a larger scale and for independent evaluation in the future.
