Second Round of School Choices Funding Open to Applications

The Education Endowment Fund (EEF) has launched a new round of its School Choices Fund which is open to research teams that are able to conduct studies.

The School Choices fund supports studies that look at how the different choices schools make lead to different outcomes. These studies examine the natural variation in the school system and use quasi-experimental designs to estimate the impact of different approaches. They will be funded when research questions are relevant to schools and experimental impact evaluations are not feasible.

Previous EEF studies of this type include:

The findings from these studies will inform the EEF’s messages to schools and policy makers, and the design of testable interventions in the future.

In this funding stream, EEF seeks proposals from research teams who can conduct the studies themselves. Applicants seeking funding to scale up a programme or intervention so that it can be independently evaluated should apply to the EEF’s next general funding round, opening in Spring 2020.

All applicants should demonstrate that their research question is salient to teachers and addresses a gap in the evidence base. Nine strategic priorities that are particularly interesting to the EEF are as follows:

Early years

What is the impact of different training routes/qualifications in the early years?

Timetabling

How does the length of the school day or break times relate to pupils’ attainment, motivation and wellbeing?
How does the total amount of teaching time in different subjects affect outcomes?

Teacher retention and quality

How does the amount of time and money spent on CPD relate to outcomes?
What is the impact of different schools’ approaches to teacher retention?
How does the level of teachers’ subject-specific qualification relate to pupil outcomes?
What is the impact of subject specialist teaching in key stage 2, where teachers with subject expertise take responsibility for that subject?
Does the amount of time that senior teachers spend teaching compared to the time spent on non-teaching roles have an impact on pupil outcomes?

Behaviour

What is the impact of different whole-school approaches to behaviour?

Applicants must register via the EEF grants portal and complete the online form.

Guidance on completing the form can be found in the application guidance notes.

The deadline for applications is 14 February 2020.

Full details…