Accountability, curriculum & SEND international review and CES exemplar

This project will support the development of a new organisation that will be the first to co-ordinate international research on macro policy to inform policy making. The Centre for Education Systems (CES) will strive to synthesise evidence, make it available in a usable form, and represent a consolidated source of authoritative information and insight to inform education policy.  

CES founding members are: Lucy Crehan, Sam Freedman, Loic Menzies and Patrick Wall. The grant will be administered by Education Policy Institute who will provide governance for the project. In addition, the project will be supported by an Advisory Board that includes: Dylan William, Anna Vignoles and Steve Munby.

Why this project is important

Comparing performance across countries is notoriously difficult. Although comparable data is available, such as the OECD PISA output, it is difficult to know whether successes are due to particular national policies or the different behaviours and cultures across nations, or other factors. This can lead to arbitrary and incoherent policy borrowing. To address this, the CES will work to ensure that policy makers are better informed, so that they can design and select policy instruments that are more coherent and more likely to achieve their intended purpose. 

How the research will be carried out

To achieve this goal, the team will undertake international evidence synthesis across ten international jurisdictions to compare with the four UK nations. Each review will address six main research questions: 

1. What is the purpose of accountability/curriculum/SEND? 
2. What is the structure of the accountability/curriculum/SEND (and, for curriculum, what is the level of control?) 
3. How is accountability/curriculum/SEND policy made and introduced? 
4. How is accountability/curriculum/SEND policy evaluated? 
5. How does context shape accountability/curriculum/SEND policy and reform? 
6. What is the evidence about the effects of the accountability/curriculum/SEND system? 

The project originally focused on the topics of accountability and curriculum. In 2024, additional funding and a partnership was agreed with the team undertaking an international analysis of SEND policy and practice, so that special educational needs policy can be interrogated alongside international approaches to accountability and curriculum. 

Through this programme of work, the project will seek to demonstrate proof of concept for the research translation role of CES.

Throughout the project the CES core team will engage with in-country experts. A knowledge brokerage champion will be appointed to directly engage with the education ecosystem, from policy makers to journalists. Policy stakeholders will be consulted at an early stage to ensure questions, concepts and outputs directly respond to the intended users’ needs and briefings, training, roundtables, videos, conference, and op eds will be used to elicit interest, engage, and educate.

Findings

Collectively, the outputs will: 

• outline the range of policy approaches that can be taken;  
• their alignment with education purpose;  
• how they are perceived by different stakeholders within countries that use them;  
• how they appear to engender outcomes; 
• and what national or international level evidence there is for this causality. 

Completion of this research will help establish the future sustainability of CES through the creation of a knowledge base from which the centre can continue to influence macro policy.