Can we estimate teacher impact from school assessment data?
The research marks the first stage of an ambitious project to bring together a wealth of strictly anonymised data from the National Institute of Teaching’s founding trusts to explore how approaches to teacher training, classroom practice, and CPD have an impact on pupil outcomes. The project team was led by Professor Rob Coe at Evidence-Based Education and Dr Raj Chande from the National Institute of Teaching.
The country is facing a crisis in teacher retention and recruitment. We need a clear, effective strategy for keeping teachers in the profession and attracting new ones. Policymakers and school leaders focused on building a resilient teacher workforce want to develop our existing teachers as effectively as possible, but they cannot know which training pathways are best because we have no reliable way of estimating a teacher’s impact.
The growth of Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) provides an opportunity to estimate teacher impact in England. In some trusts, thousands of pupils across dozens of schools sit the same assessment at the same time, sometimes having been taught the same curriculum. The assessment data can be anonymised so that no individual school, teacher, or pupil can be identified. Researchers can analyse these completely anonymised assessment results to see if some teachers consistently achieve more progress with their pupils than others, accounting for prior attainment and key demographic information (such as SEND status, or eligibility for Free School Meals). While remaining completely anonymous, these estimates of teacher impact could be used to analyse whether some teacher development pathways are more effective than others.
The research set out to establish that the use of anonymised assessment data for these purposes is acceptable to teachers and school leaders, and that the assessments are sufficiently accurate measures of attainment.
Dr Raj Chande said: “Effective teaching is our most powerful lever for improving children’s outcomes, especially in disadvantaged areas, but we don’t have a reliable way of measuring a teacher’s impact. We’re encouraged by the findings of our study. We found teachers and school leaders are open to the analysis of attainment data, as long as it is anonymised. And, our pilot analyses found we can meaningfully estimate teacher impact, our results are not just random variation, or ‘noise’. This means in future, we can identify the development pathways and even classroom practices of our most impactful teachers.
The journey doesn't end here. NIoT will now build a secure and open data infrastructure so other researchers can analyse anonymized data from our partner MATs, establish an Expert Working Group with teacher development experts to ensure our analyses are grounded in the lived experiences of the sector, and pilot cutting edge AI tools to identify the classroom practices of our most effective teachers.
Our ambition is to identify and share practical improvements to continuous professional development that can benefit all teachers and more importantly, their pupils.”
You can read the reports here or find out more at our webinar on 18th September.