ResearchED National Conference London 6/9/14

The National ResearchED Conference this year was held at Raine's Foundation School,

The day began with an historical journey into education from when Raine's was established to the present day, by the present Headteacher, John Bradshaw. The difficulties faced over the years remain remarkably similar. Tom Bennett followed up, by trying to ignite a polite rebellion against top-down CPD and encouraging teachers to have a healthy relationship with research - cautious and curious.

One of the best things about ResearchED conferences is you get a choice of speakers (although this can lead to a bit of a headache deciding who to go to see). So first up, Dr Jonathan Sharples from The Education Endowment EEF. Jonathan talked about current research projects and advocated research champions within every school. He provided guidance on how to perform your own research:

1. Decide what you want to achieve
2. Identify possible solutions
3. Give it the best chance of success
4. Did it work?
5. Securing and spreading change.
And back to number one...

Next, the popular Dylan Wiliam (name spelt correctly!). Dylan's lecture was the provocatively titled, "Why teaching will never be a research-based profession and why that's a good thing". His first argument was that the cupboard was bare in relation to ed-research. He highlighted the difficulty of establishing causality and only lucky experiments get published (i.e. those who show a correlation, especially if it is the positive/negative result the author wished to see).

Following Dylan, I stayed in the beautiful old school hall to watch Prof. Robert Coe. Robert started with a cautionary note about offering teachers feedback after lesson observations. He emphasised, "What you think is good teaching may not be". Just because a certain way of teaching works for one person does not mean this can be transferred to another teacher, teaching a different class. Feedback to teachers must be:

1. based on best evidence
2. reflect diversity of teachers
3. include protocols for demonstrating when they are met

To improve teaching a better understanding of evidence is needed that is based on research.

Phillipa Cordingly (CUREE) has researched exceptional schools in challenging circumstances and her compared them to other schools to try to discover why they are exceptional. Her comprehensive findings can be downloaded here.

Amanda Spielman (OFQUAL) provided useful insight and data into the examination process. She discusssed the pros and cons of the current examination system. People hugely underestimate variability in year-to-year exams. This can be as much as 12% in mathematics (which is generally straight forward to mark) and not surprising even higher other subjects (e.g. English 15%). This means OFSTED, Governors, Headteachers etc. need to be very cautious when analsying results as a sudden rise/fall may be down to natural variation and nothing to do with latest interventions.  When we look on an individual student basis, about 23% of students won't be allocated the correct grade (usually a grade either side).

More information about other talks and blogs about the conference can be found here: