Teacher improvement through data and evaluation (TIDE)
Research conducted
July 2024 – December 2028
The National Institute of Teaching is leading an innovative five-year project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, targeting teaching preparation and development in England.
Project overview
The Teacher Improvement through Data and Evaluation (TIDE) project will use the anonymised data in the Teacher Education Dataset (TED) to identify the characteristics and practices of effective teachers in England. The findings will be shared with the education sector to assist school leaders, researchers, and policymakers in developing strategies for recruiting, training, and retaining high-quality teachers, with the aim of improving pupil outcomes.
The five-year research project will:
- Use the TED to establish the statistical impact of teachers on the attainment of their pupils.
- Explore the factors that contribute to teacher impact, such as class allocation practices, and in-school teacher development strategies.
- Collaborate with teacher development leads in partner schools to co-create and pilot improvements to teacher development strategies, such as mentoring or observation practices.
US research has successfully estimated individual teacher impact by analysing their pupils’ progress and it has been shown that this approach is possible in England. The TIDE project will go even further by including all school phases, year groups, and subjects beyond English and Maths. In collaboration with leading education academics, we will investigate how our measure of teacher impact is associated with, for example, a teacher’s experience, their practices, their training pathways, and the characteristics and practices of their schools. We will analyse existing data routinely collected by our schools, conduct surveys, and explore novel in-classroom data sources such as audio recordings of lessons that will be coded using natural-language processing. We will always qualitatively validate our insights by consulting the NIoT’s experienced teacher educators and teacher development leads in our partner schools.
By working with our teacher development experts at NIoT we will integrate insights from our research directly into our programmes. These improvements will be evaluated through Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) in our founding MATs. Detailed process evaluations will show researchers and school leaders how they too can use anonymised data in the TED to develop, implement and evaluate such interventions in the future.
Findings will be shared as they emerge in a series of publications. We will be working closely with teachers, teacher educators, school leaders and members of the Strategic Advisory Board to ensure that our findings can be turned into practical and useful insights for the education sector.
Project team
- Dr Calum Davey, Executive Director of Research, NIoT
- Dr Raj Chande, Senior Research Associate, NIoT
- Shaun Dillon, Director of Data, NIoT
- Claire Maud, Research Fellow, NIoT
- Professor Rob Coe, Evidence Based Education
- Professor Becky Allen, Teacher Tapp & University of Brighton
- Professor John Jerrim, University College London
- Dr Sam Sims, University College London
- Faculty AI