While the use of experimental design has been a feature of education research for 30 years or more, in the past 10 years we have seen a significant shift to follow in the footsteps of the health sector, including the use of randomised controlled trials (RCTs),
This has meant a heavy emphasis on isolating specific interventions and applying experimental design approaches to understand “what works”.
The Nuffield Early Language Intervention RCT is a prime example of how these trials can help increase the evidence base available for the education sector.
Bringing local context into education research
However, in 2021 the Medical Research Council guidance for the health sector was updated to prioritise a place-based approach to the development of interventions and evaluations so that local “place” issues are considered.
The place-based approach recognises that for interventions to be effective in improving health outcomes, there needs to be an understanding at the local level, rather than only at the individual level, as to the determinants of poor health.
It is a shift that those who fund and support the development of interventions and their associated evaluations in the education sector should consider following as a second arm in the movement to better understand what works.
The reasons for locality-focused development and evaluation can be broadly considered twofold:
- A single intervention (such as what is possible to test with RCTs) is unlikely on its own to sustainably improve population outcomes.
- There are inevitable interdependencies within the system that together work to improve outcomes and “the system” looks vastly different in different local areas
But what would this look like within the education sector and, given the interconnectedness between education and health, how could it link to wider local health services?
Early years impact
A strong place to start with this kind of approach would be in the earliest years of children’s lives, when outcomes and their determinants are more inextricably linked.
For example, children’s speech, language and communication outcomes are demonstrably important to many life outcomes, and the opportunities to influence, improve and build these skills do not sit exclusively with the education sector.
In practical terms, this means children’s development is influenced by the family and their immediate and wider environment, as well as by the range of professional support that sits around them; from midwives and health visitors through to early childhood education and care staff.
Importantly, this landscape is different depending on the locality, and the way in which interventions interact is hugely important to outcomes for children.
Capturing this through a different evaluation approach is key and, while complex, there are nascent examples that show how it can work.
A programme called Early Talk for York, developed and grown in the City of York Council area, is now demonstrating significant impact across a range of children’s outcomes. While the education sector plays a key role, the development of the approach has had multi-disciplinary partnership working at its heart from inception.
Notably the programme has been shown to “close the gap” between disadvantaged children and their peers at a time when the general direction of travel is in the opposite direction.
Tes covered Early Talk for York earlier this year. Evaluation of the programme so far has shown impact in the following headline areas:
- Improved identification of speech, language and communication needs.
- Increased practitioner knowledge, skills and confidence.
- Wider systems improvement: increased integrated and partnership working and reduction of demand on specialist services.
- Improved children’s outcomes.
As well as being identified in the programme’s own evaluation, the above have been seen through an independent evaluation of “step one” of the approach by the University of York, multiple Ofsted and Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspections of individual organisations and local area-wide inspection and review by Ofsted, the CQC and the Local Government Association.
The need for more research
Now, of course, Early Talk for York cannot be a “lift and shift” model to be picked up and dropped into another area.
However, there are things that could be learned from the approach and the Early Talk for York programme developers have identified six “active ingredients” that other local areas interested in developing a similar approach should pay attention to.
However, the approach would still benefit from a fully independent evaluation to examine these further.
Most RCT designs would not be able to pick up on the context-specific elements identified by the Early Talk for York programme developers, and often local innovation is too small a scale for an RCT.
What is needed is greater investment in these alternative research designs to explore impact. And there is also a need for more credibility to be assigned to local innovations.
We hope the Early Talk for York example and the growing body of research from the health sector showing the informative benefits of a placed-based approach will help usher in a new era of education research, where the research community has 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.
Dr Erin Dysart is a research fellow at the University of Leeds who specialises in evaluating educational language interventions
Rob Newton is social mobility project manager at City of York Council and associate strategic director at Huntington Research School in York
Dr Sara Bonetti is interim director of the Institute of Early Years Education and an independent researcher with a focus on the early years workforce
Professor Claudine Bowyer-Crane is professor of education at the University of Sheffield
