Teacher education dataset (TED)
What is the problem?
We know that teachers are the biggest factor in schools influencing children's educational success, and they have an even greater impact on the outcomes of children experiencing the highest levels of disadvantage.
This means that we need to identify what makes effective teaching if we want to increase teacher impact on pupil outcomes.
Currently, there is no reliable method to measure teacher impact across the workforce or to determine the effects of professional development or training on teaching improvement.
What are we doing about it?
To solve this problem, we are undertaking an ambitious project to develop the Teacher Education Dataset (TED). This dataset links anonymised teacher and pupil data whilst preserving important data relationships so that we can start to answer interesting questions such as ‘can we measure teacher impact?’, and ‘which school practices and characteristics are associated with teacher impact?’. Once we know the answers to these and other questions, we can share them with those best placed to make informed decisions that support pupil success, including policymakers, teacher educators, headteachers, and trust and local authority leaders.
In July 2024, we published the report of our pilot with 36 schools in our partner multi-academy trusts which found that we were able to measure the impact of teachers on their pupils by using anonymised assessment data to evaluate the progress pupils made over an academic year.
TED has already produced novel findings. For example, in this report, we looked at the relative effectiveness of teachers for children with and without a marker for SEND, to see if there are teachers who are particularly good at adding value for children with SEND or vice versa. We found that teachers were equally effective for children with and without SEND in our dataset, and that children with SEND were not systematically taught by better or worse teachers, on average.
What happens next?
We are now in the process of developing a system to make it easier to gather the data from multi-academy trusts (MATs). We are also conducting an exciting research project called Teacher Improvement through Data and Evaluation (TIDE) which will use the TED to explore the traits of highly effective teaching and how teacher impact develops over time.
In the future, researchers will be able to ask important questions of the Teacher Education Dataset using a new OpenSAFELY-Schools platform (OS-Schools, currently in development). Originally developed for analysing NHS GP data, the OpenSAFELY platform will act as a researcher-facing interface for the TED. The platform will allow researchers to analyse the impact of teacher development on pupil outcomes whilst ensuring data security and safeguarding the privacy of staff, pupils and schools by providing fully anonymised answers to the research questions. OS-Schools is being developed in collaboration with the Bennett Institute for Applied Science at Oxford University.
Schools will also have opportunity to contribute their data to the dataset and we hope that our measure of teacher impact will become more reliable, accurate and detailed as more data is collected.
Find out more about the Teacher Education Dataset and how we are using it here:
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