Improving educational outcomes through high-quality provision is one of the main aims of education systems across the world. Over recent decades there has been a concerted move by policymakers in many countries to promote more evidence-informed approaches in schools (OECD, 2017), and this has led to a growth in the awareness of using research findings to improve the quality of school provision (Slavin, 2020; Brown et al., 2017).
Despite this greater recognition of the role of research and evidence in schools, research also indicates that it is still infrequently used by teachers to inform their teaching practice (Nelson et al., 2017) and, importantly, there is a lack of good-quality research evidence to tell us how to mobilise evidence into use in education (Gorard et al., 2020). Following the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is now essential for schools to identify strategies and programmes to help learners catch up. School leaders need access to a wider range of good-quality research to help them identify more promising strategies and ensure staff are not burdened with the implemention of unproven or ineffective interventions. Very little research is currently available to assess the range and evidence base for interventions that are being used in schools.
