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 will link 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?’.
We piloted the approach with 36 schools in our partner multi-academy trusts and 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.
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.
If you are a school or MAT interested in contributing data to the TED, please get in touch with us [email protected].
Find out more about the Teacher Education Dataset and how we are using it here:
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