Beng Huat See

Durham University | DU · School of Education

Background: England has an ethnically diverse population; reflected in the teacher workforce, and the student body in schools. However, it is not clear that these figures are in proportion to each other. This paper examines the ethnic profile of students and their teachers and considers their geographical distribution. Methods : This paper uses exi...

Background: England has an ethnically diverse population; reflected in the teacher workforce, and the student body in schools. However, it is not clear that these figures are in proportion to each other. This paper examines the ethnic profile of students and their teachers and considers their geographical distribution. Methods : This paper uses ex...

This paper summarises the findings of a large-scale structured review of 73 studies to identify promising interventions to increase school enrolment and attendance, particularly in less developed countries where school attendance is not mandatory. Evidence from the stronger studies suggests that for children living in poverty, provision of easy acc...

This paper reports on a comprehensive review of international evidence, synthesising the findings of some of the strongest empirical work on the main factors influencing people's decisions to be teachers or not. Four search engines, including Google and Google Scholar and five electronic databases identified 517 studies of which 212 were included i...

Teacher shortages are influenced by a complicated interaction of factors. Most prior research does not consider such complexities, resulting in misleading interpretations of the problem and ineffective solutions. Findings from our multi-pronged research approach suggests that there is no shortage of people wanting to teach in England. Therefore, wi...

Understanding people’s perceptions of teaching as an occupation, and their motivation or otherwise to teach, can help identify which initiatives/policies are most promising in improving teacher recruitment. Previous studies have often sought only the views of teachers/teacher trainees to understand why people choose teaching as a career. Recruitmen...

The disproportionality in the school workforce in England’s schools has drawn little interest from policymakers and education practitioners. This article addresses the noted gap in the literature and provides trends empirical evidence in England’s teachers workforce by ethnic background and its disproportionality when compared to the pupils they te...

Non-cognitive learning taking place at school helps form dispositions that can be as important as cognitive outcomes in terms of lifelong relevance. There are diverse interventions and school-based programmes targeting non-cognitive skills, but the evidence of their impact is, so far, unclear. To help increase the evidence bases, we conducted a qua...

This chapter is about the experiences of disadvantaged children in the north during the pandemic lockdown, and how it has impacted on their education.

Teacher shortages have long been a policy concern for many countries worldwide. Despite wide-ranging policy initiatives and billions of pounds spent addressing the issue, shortages are still being reported, especially in the secondary sector and for some subjects. This recurrent teacher supply “crisis” is complex, and has no one simple cause or set...

This paper describes an independently evaluated randomised controlled trial of a self-affirmation intervention, replicating earlier studies, mostly conducted in the US with ethnic minority students. Self-affirmation theory suggests that some stigmatised groups, such as those from ethnic minority or poor families, face stereotype threats which under...

This Special Issue of Education Sciences on the theme of Education Matters was commissioned in recognition of the important role that teachers play in the development of students’ learning and wider outcomes [...]

A priority area identified by the Department of Education (England) and the Economic Social and Research Council is the development of teachers, especially in primary music education where the limited opportunities for training offered by teacher training providers have raised concerns. This paper reports on an evaluation of a collaborative partner...

There is considerable evidence that the level of parental involvement is closely associated with children’s school outcomes. Schools are increasingly using digital technology to engage parents, but the impact of such technology on students’ learning behaviour is still unclear. This paper reviews and synthesises international evidence from 29 studie...

This paper presents the results of a large-scale survey of undergraduates in England, concerning their envisaged career choices and how they made them. This gives a more complete account of those who do and do not want to be teachers than usual in the existing literature based primarily on prospective/existing teacher accounts. The paper looks at t...

Pupil Premium funding has been provided to schools in England since 2011, to reduce socio-economic segregation, and the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. There is little evidence it works. Some stakeholders are now considering whether funding should cease, or have a new objective. Evaluating the impact of such a funding p...

While education technology has been widely used in the classroom, and considerable investments have been made to support its use, the evidence base for many such technologies is weak, and their efficacy is unclear. This aim of this paper is to systematically review and synthesise empirical research on the use of technology in formative assessment,...

This paper presents an evaluation of “Literacy for Life” (LfL) – a whole-school literacy programme, implemented in five secondary schools in England. The aims of LfL were to improve literacy attainment and to promote positive attitudes to reading and writing. However, when compared to other schools, there is little or no evidence that being in a Lf...

Background: A raft of initiatives and reforms have been introduced in many countries to attract and recruit school teachers, many of which do not have a clear evidence base, so their effectiveness remains unclear. Prior research has been largely correlational in design. This paper describes a rigorous and comprehensive review of international evide...

This paper describes a systematic review of international research evidence identifying the most promising approaches to attracting and retaining teachers in hard-to-staff areas. Only empirical studies that employed a causal or suitable comparative design and had robust measurements of recruitment and retention outcomes were considered. Studies wer...

For decades there have been calls by concerned stakeholders to improve the quality of education research, and some progress has been made towards creating a more secure evidence base in some areas. More programmes and approaches that have a reasonable evidence base are now also being used in schools (but not in policy, and not necessarily because t...

In the last two decades there has been a proliferation of proposals for instructional practices, all promising to improve pupils’ academic attainment. Many of these approaches have not been robustly or independently evaluated. Schools, enthusiastic to improve their children’s academic outcomes, may rely on some of the more popular but untested appr...

This paper presents the findings of a 1-year efficacy trial of Maths Counts (MC), an intensive, individualised programme delivered by trained teaching assistants. The programme was delivered 3 times a week over 10 weeks. The sample included 291 Year 3 to Year 6 pupils (age 7 to 11) from 35 primary schools in England. Pupils were individually random...

Pupil Premium funding has been provided to schools in England since 2011, to help overcome socio-economic segregation between schools, and reduce the poverty attainment gap. Yet there is little evidence such an approach is effective. Some important stakeholders are considering whether Pupil Premium should stop or be re-routed. It is therefore essen...

Disadvantaged pupils in England tend to have lower average attainment than their peers. They are also less likely to be involved in wider learning and opportunities for experience beyond the classroom walls. Approaches which support learning activities beyond the traditional classroom might assist in overcoming the persistent achievement gap of dis...

This paper presents the results of a systematic review of international studies to establish whether explicit teaching of critical thinking is effective in enhancing the critical thinking skills of English language learners in higher education and to identify the most promising approaches. A search of 12 electronic databases supplemented by other s...

There is widespread concern about the shortage of secondary school teachers in England. Recruitment to initial teacher training regularly fails to meet its intake targets. The secondary school pupil population is increasing. Teacher vacancies have risen, and more teachers are reportedly leaving the profession prematurely. Despite considerable inves...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a response to Goldstein et al.’s (2017) attempted rebuttal of the authors’ prior paper in this journal (See and Gorard 2015). Design/methodology/approach The prior paper reported a systematic review of interventions to involve engaging parents more in their children’s education in order to raise sc...

Background: Educational interventions are often complex, and their outcomes could be due to factors not focused on in the impact evaluation. Therefore, educational evaluations using a randomised control trial (RCT) design approach need to go beyond obtaining the impact results alone. Purpose: Process evaluation is embedded in the evaluation design...

Schools are places where children can learn behaviour, skills and attitudes that have lifelong relevance. In England, despite the continuing emphasis on attainment, there are clear moves to consider also the wider and non-cognitive outcomes of schooling – such as pupils’ development of trust, critical thinking and civic-mindedness. However, there i...

With the push for evidence-informed policy and practice, schools and policy makers are now increasingly encouraged and supported to use and enagage with research evidence. This means that consumers of research will now need to be discerning in judging the quality of research evidence that will inform their decisions. This paper evaluates the qualit...

The aims of the report are to : ● Establish the ‘reach’ of the Principia education programme, in terms of the number of schools and number of young people who have taken part in the projects. ● Identify, as far as possible, patterns of participation in terms of phase of schooling, type of educational establishment and level of student disadvantage,...

Recent concerns about extremism, and young people’s vulnerability to exposure of radicalisation and such negative influences, have increased interest in young people’s participation in civic activities. There is some evidence that such activities at school can have a positive influence on young people’s attitudes and behaviour, but such evidence ha...

The Trials of Evidence-based Education explores the promise, limitations and achievements of evidence-based policy and practice, as the attention of funders moves from a sole focus on attainment outcomes to political concern about character-building and wider educational impacts. Providing a detailed look at the pros, cons and areas for improvement...

In England, as elsewhere, there is a tension in primary schools between imparting knowledge and teaching basic skills like literacy and numeracy. State-mandated programmes are generally concerned with structure and skills. However, a number of ministers and advisers across administrations have sought to expand the explicit teaching of world knowled...

There are tensions within formal education between imparting knowledge and the development of skills for handling that knowledge. In the primary school sector, the latter can also be squeezed out of the curriculum by a focus on basic skills such as literacy and numeracy. What happens when an explicit attempt is made to develop young children's reas...

This is a wide-ranging review of the evidence on effective teaching approaches for primary age children. It evaluates the evidence carefully, leading to summaries of what is known to work, what is not known to work, and what is known to be harmful. The book answers the questions: What are currently the most effective approaches for teaching primary...

There are concerns that too many young people, from disadvantaged backgrounds, are moving into secondary education in the UK, and elsewhere, without the necessary literacy skills to make progress with the wider secondary school curriculum. A large number of interventions have been proposed to reduce this poverty gradient. This paper summarises the...

There has been much furore over the marginalisation of arts in schools in the UK since the introduction of the English Baccalaureate (Ebacc). The Ebacc excludes arts as one of the core subjects counted in the GCSE. Similarly, in the USA the No Child Left Behind Act with its focus on maths, literacy and science has led to the devaluation of arts in...

Almost every educational system in the world regards numeracy and literacy as more important than the arts. In the UK arts interest groups and politicians have, for years, asked for arts education to be accorded the same priority arguing that arts contribute to learning and development of useful skills. It is not clear if these claims were based on...

This paper describes a randomised controlled trial conducted with 10 secondary schools in England to evaluate the impact and feasibility of Fresh Start as an intervention to help new entrants with low prior literacy. Fresh Start is a synthetic phonics programme for small groups of pupils, here implemented three times per week over 22 weeks. The int...

Background: There is worldwide interest in improving the effectiveness of teachers and teaching. This paper considers two strands of that interest. It revisits the impact of using enhanced feedback from teachers to pupils as a way of improving attainment, and it looks at the feasibility of teachers using research evidence to create their own interv...

This paper presents the findings of the first independent UK evaluation of a large-scale randomised controlled trial of Response-to-Intervention, used as a catch-up literacy intervention. A total of 385 pupils in their final year of primary school (Year 6) were involved in the study (181 treatment and 204 control). These were identified as those at...

This paper summarises the results of a review of the literature linking parental involvement in their child’s education to attainment at or before primary school. The search involved nine electronic databases supplemented by other sources, and yielded 4,898 apparently relevant reports. Of these, 127 were reports of attempted evaluations to see whet...

This paper describes an evaluation of an internet-based reading programme called Accelerated Reader (AR), which is widely used in UK schools and worldwide. AR is a whole-group reading management and monitoring programme that aims to stimulate the habit of independent reading among primary and secondary age pupils. The evaluation involved 349 pupils...

There is currently a considerable body of research suggesting that parental involvement is linked to young people’s attainment at school. It is also generally agreed that a number of factors such as parental background, attention, warmth and parenting style are associated with children’s later life outcomes. However, although widely assumed on the...

There is currently a considerable body of research suggesting that parental involvement is linked to young people’s attainment at school. It is also generally agreed that a number of factors such as parental background, attention, warmth and parenting style are associated with children’s later life outcomes. However, although widely assumed on the...

This paper summarises the results of a review of the literature linking parental involvement in their child’s education to attainment at or before primary school. The search involved nine electronic databases supplemented by other sources, and yielded 4,898 apparently relevant reports. Of these, 127 were reports of attempted evaluations to see whet...

This paper is based on one of the first completed studies funded by the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF). EEF was set up in response to repeated demands for clearer evidence on school improvement. The paper presents the results of an intensive 10-week literacy intervention called Switch-on Reading. This was trialled in England as part of a go...

In England, some children have not reached what are considered to be expected levels in literacy and maths by the time they move from primary to secondary school. This is more likely for children living in disadvantaged areas. One proposal to address this is the provision of summer holiday schools for potentially disadvantaged pupils who are reachi...

The intervention was an encouragement, via action research, for teachers in one local authority partnership of schools to use enhanced feedback in their lessons. The schools were the Anglican Schools Partnership who led the development. The study involved all Year 2 to Year 6 pupils in nine treatment and five comparator schools over one year. The...

Response to Intervention (RTI) is a targeted programme that uses a tiered approach to identify the needs of low achieving pupils. The approach begins with whole class teaching (Tier 1), followed by small group tuition (Tier 2) for those who need more attention, and one to one tutoring (Tier 3) for those who do not respond to the small group instruc...

Background: The transition from primary to secondary schools in England is marked by a concern over potential learning loss, and the realisation that a small number of students have not reached an expected or threshold level of literacy. The latter can then impact on progress in all areas of the secondary curriculum, and is reflected in subsequent...

Background: The transition from primary to secondary schools in England is marked by a concern over potential learning loss, and the realisation that a small number of students have not reached an expected or threshold level of literacy. The latter can then impact on progress in all areas of the secondary curriculum, and is reflected in subsequent...

This case describes a current evaluation of an educational intervention to help disadvantaged children catch up in literacy at around the time they transfer to their senior school. The evaluation is based on a randomised controlled trial design, which the case explains is the most appropriate for testing or establishing a causal claim. The case als...

This article describes the social and economic “segregation” of students between schools in England, and the likely causes of its levels and changes over time. It involves a re-analysis of the intakes to all schools in England 1989–2011, and shows how strongly clustered the students are in particular schools. The pattern for primary-age schools is...