Findings from a survey of more than 1,600 primary and secondary teachers, commissioned by the trust, show that there is a low awareness in schools of the best ways to improve children’s attainment, with teachers relying on ‘trial and error approaches’, rather than proven interventions.
The pupil premium is worth £600 a year to schools for every child eligible for Free School Meals.
The report by the National Foundation for Educational Research found that less than 3 per cent of teachers were able to identify the best classroom approaches as priorities for spending the pupil premium.
The trust has developed a toolkit to provide guidance for teachers on the best ways to use the money, based on analysing thousands of studies, singling out approaches such as how to give effective feedback to pupils and enabling pupils to teach their peers.
However, the survey found that teachers singled out reducing class sizes, more one-to-one tuition and employing more teaching assistants as the priorities for spending the pupil premium.
However, the trust said that research showed that these strategies were not a straightforward route to improving pupil attainment.
Class sizes need to be reduced to at least 20 or below 15 before there are any benefits, and employing more teaching assistants is considered to have a very small effect or no effect on attainment.
The report also found that many teachers indicated that their school used ‘trial and error approaches and learning from the experience of other schools’ to evaluate approaches and programmes.
It concludes, ‘While a large proportion of teachers believed that decisions in their school are based on research evidence, it is unclear what evidence they are using.’
Sir Peter Lampl, chair of the Sutton Trust, said, ‘If the billions of pounds allocated through the Pupil Premium are to genuinely help improve the results of poorer children then we need to ensure that teachers receive the best guidance on what works in the classroom.
‘This is why we developed the Toolkit, and why the work of the Education Endowment Foundation is so important in trialling and evaluating approaches in schools.’
- The new edition of the Teaching and Learning Toolkit is available free to download at www.educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/toolkit
It evaluates more than 20 different approaches and highlights those that have the biggest impact on pupils’ attainment.
