We awarded £2.4 million to a Strategic Fund project aiming to further our understanding of teaching quality and identify ways to improve teacher development.
Teaching improvement through data and evaluation (TIDE) launched on 13 February and will explore how teacher training, classroom techniques, and professional development impact student success.
Project background
The National Institute of Teaching (NIoT) – a school-led organisation established by four large multi-academy trusts – will take the lead in delivering this five-year project. NIoT will partner with some of the leading education researchers in the country, data experts at Oxford University’s Bennett Institute as well as experts in AI.
Most people see schools as familiar and formative institutions, that have shaped our lives and those of our children from an early age. The quality of teachers and teaching is the most important driver of educational outcomes in the education system.
Yet, rigorous ways of measuring, understanding and improving this quality and its relationships to outcomes are heavily constrained by limitations in nationally collected data.
This project has built a significant and unique anonymised dataset linking pupil performance and progress data to the experience, characteristics, training and lesson delivery of several thousand teachers.
Next steps
Beginning in July 2024, the project will be carried out in three phases. In the first stage, the researchers will statistically estimate the ‘added value’ of teachers on the attainment of their pupils.
In the next phase, they will draw a range of techniques, including the use of AI, to explore the factors that contribute to teacher impact, such as teacher training, the way that teachers are assigned to classes, and specific teaching practices and competencies.
Finally, and most importantly, they will work with schools to co-create, pilot and evaluate specific improvements to teacher development, including additional resources, staff mentoring or lesson observation practices.
Findings will be shared through reports, seminars, open-access datasets and schools-facing dissemination.
This is one of the most ambitious and potentially influential education projects the Foundation has ever funded and could constitute a step-change in the understanding and improvement of teaching quality.