Education should follow this lead from medical research

Dr Erin Dysart, has published an opinion piece in TES with colleagues from The University of Sheffield, York City Council and the national Day Nurseries Association. It argues that funders should support the development and evaluation of educational interventions which take in to account local context. Many interventions are evaluated on a large-scale basis (usually though a Randomised Controlled Trial design). This has meant a heavy emphasis on isolating specific interventions and applying experimental design approaches to understand ‘what works’. This approach often fails to understand the context in which interventions do and do not work.

To demonstrate the need for local context programme evaluation they example Early Talk for York, a whole-systems approach to upskill practitioners and improve the speech, language and communication skills of children in early years settings. Evaluation of the programme so far had shown promising results, including significant impact on children’s outcomes, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, without funders backing a full evaluation of the approach there is no evidence of how and why the approach works. This opinion piece hopes to usher in a new era of education research, where the research community have the vision to go beyond largely focusing on the impact of single interventions at scale and into a more holistic, less linear but more meaningful approach.