Education trials and interventions to improve attainment will be
carried out across schools, colleges and early years settings,
backed by a new multi-million government grant.
The Department for Education is to continue funding the Education
Endowment Foundation (EEF) with a new grant of
£137 million, cementing the independent charity’s role as a
central part of the education landscape for at least the next
decade.
The EEF will continue to
support the Government’s teacher training reforms, whilst
expanding activity in the early years. This will include working
as the evidence partner for the Early Years Stronger
Practice Hubs, which are due to launch in November 2022, to
share effective evidence-based practices with local settings to
help boost young children’s development.
The Government is also announcing a further £66 million for the
next phase of the Accelerator Fund to increase access to
high-quality literacy and numeracy programmes in schools over the
next three academic years. This forms part of the Government’s
commitment to ensuring that any child who falls behind in maths
or English will get the support they need to get back on track.
As part of this, the EEF will be given up
to £41.5 million to continue to increase its evidence around
effective programmes, scale-up existing programmes, and support
schools with implementation. Up to £21 million of the funding
will also support Maths and English Hubs to roll out high quality
programmes to schools.
Schools Minister, , 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 carried out
over 200 evaluations to understand which interventions and
approaches are most effective in closing the attainment gap,
engaging 23,000 nurseries, schools, and colleges in trials and
reaching over 1.8 million children, including 500,000 pupils
eligible for free school meals.
Today’s funding for the Accelerator Fund also follows a
successful first year of the initiative, in which
the EEF supported 20
programmes across more than 1,500 settings, including those in
regions that experienced significant learning loss during the
pandemic. Some of these programmes included ‘Reciprocal
Reading’, an intensive 12-16 small-group programme to improve
reading comprehension and ’1stClass@Number’, which
supported 6–7-year-olds with low attainment in maths to improve
their skills.
English
Hubs and Maths Hubs programmes
also helped to deliver programmes to over 5,000 schools, giving
them access to phonics and numeracy programmes. These programmes
have experienced strong demand and will continue to be rolled out
to additional schools as part of ongoing funding announced today.
Schools can contact their local hub for more information.
Areas with high proportions of children from disadvantaged
backgrounds will continue to be prioritised for the schemes to
help level up attainment.
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 initiatives form part of the Government’s wider ambitious
education recovery plan worth nearly £5 billion. This includes
£1.5 billion for a national tutoring revolution, through which
over two million high-quality tutoring courses have already
started. A £1 billion Recovery Premium is also supporting some of
the most disadvantaged pupils across the country to catch up on
lost learning.
The £137 million re-endowment of the EEF is in addition
to around £40 million of remaining funding from
the EEF’s original 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 to
Maths and English Hubs, up to £3 million for a procured supplier
to provide capability building support to programmes to help them
scale-up, and up to £500,000 for an evaluation of
the EEF element of the
Accelerator Fund programme.
