Between 2016 and 2018 the Department for Education funded 171 Strategic School Improvement Fund (SSIF) programmes for supporting vulnerable communities across England. Billed as a flagship school improvement fund, the SSIF was closed with only £56m of the £140m originally allocated to it spent. The authors of this paper are supporting seven SSIF projects with formative, programme-wide evaluation design and analysis. They were involved with the programmes from the point of project design, through implementation, including delivery and formative evaluation, all the way to the final reporting. This presented a rare opportunity to look across several large-scale school-improvement initiatives to better understand the opportunities and challenges of school improvement at scale and explore implications for policy, research and practice. The focus of this paper is analysis of how programme- and project-level intentions and structures linked with on-the-ground school improvement and evidence emerging from programme-wide process and impact evaluations of the projects. It also explores some of the practical and evidential challenges encountered.
This paper is innovative in focusing on the principles and practice of evaluation design for supporting teacher development and school improvement. It describes how, using evidence about effective CPD (Cordingley et al., 2015) and school improvement (CUREE, 2016; Robinson, Hohepa, & Lloyd, 2009), evaluation tools for generating formative evidence were designed into the CPD and school improvement support processes. ‘Close-to-practice’ process evaluation, using assessment and planning tools, both generated evidence of improvement but also drove it, prompting collaborative reflection on evidence of pupil learning between colleagues across schools, subject areas and phases. This evidence provides insights into the developing thinking of teachers and leaders across the SSIF programmes, their responses and contributions the school improvement programmes, and changes in practice.
