Toolkit supports better learning for disadvantaged pupils

The Teaching and Learning Toolkit helps schools in the UK and around the world to decide how to make the most of funding they are allocated by government.

This includes supporting schools in England in how best to use £16 billion in education spending allocated between 2013 and 2020 as part of the Pupil Premium.

The Teaching and Learning Toolkit

The Teaching and Learning Toolkit, hosted and supported by the Education Endowment Foundation, provides schools with free online summaries of research so teachers and other education professionals can best use their resources to improve children’s learning outcomes.

Together, the summaries cover 46 education topics, each summarised in terms of the average impact they have on pupils’ learning, the strength of the supporting evidence, and the cost.

Reducing inequalities

The Toolkit also guides the commissioning and evaluation work of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), which is working to reduce inequalities in school outcomes in England.

According to a 2016 survey, two-thirds of head teachers in England used the toolkit to inform how best to spend their pupil premium funding.

Its reach has been extensive and has involved approximately 10,000 schools and more than one million children and young people in England.

The toolkit was also identified as a model for the ‘What Works’ network for social policy, which has informed over £200 billion of Government spending.

Guiding global education decision-making

In addition to being endorsed by English Local Authorities, the toolkit is recommended on the Welsh Government’s ‘Learning Wales’ website for effective allocation of funds from the Pupil Deprivation Grant.

It has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan and has been used in the Jordanian, Australian, Spanish and Latin American education systems alongside Education Scotland.

Future plans will see the adaptation of the Teaching and Learning Toolkit for teachers in Cameroon, Nigeria, Chad, and Niger and will include a French translation.

Find out more

• Find out more about the Toolkit, now publicly available online as the Sutton Trust/Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit.
• The toolkit has been devised by Steve Higgins, Professor in our School of Education, and Associate Professor Dimitra Kokotsaki, working with the Sutton Trust and the EEF. Former Durham University professor Rob Coe was also involved in the toolkit’s initial development.
• Read about the research on meta-analysis of intervention research in education, comparative meta-analysis of education research findings and communicating comparative findings in education.
• Interested in studying at Durham? Explore our undergraduate and postgraduate courses in our School of Education, ranked in the world top 100 by the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2021.