This paper considers the ways in which research relationships develop between educational evaluators and those who they are evaluating, and the potential for genuine partnership within this context. We will draw on our experience of educational intervention and evaluations in general, and in particular on a recent intervention and evaluation of Research Learning Communities in English primary schools, which was funded by the Education Endowment Foundation, to conceptualise the process of partnership in an intervention/evaluation context.
The paper asks:
The processes of coming together and developing collaborative work have been conceptualised by Rose and Norwich (2014). They highlight the roles of development and commitment to shared goals, of collective efficacy in working towards those goals, and of process/outcome beliefs in developing and maintaining collaborative processes. Rose and Norwich’s model informs our discussion of the partnership processes in intervention and evaluation teams. Edwards’ (2005, 2007) concept of relational agency, in which she outlines the ways in which interaction influences the development of people’s thinking, and their ways of working which they then develop in the future, will help us consider the ways in which members of intervention and evaluation teams can change as a result of coming together.
The authors have between them wide-ranging experiences of educational intervention and evaluation. This paper arises from their shared experiences on the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) funded Research Learning Communities (RLC) project, as leads of the intervention team (Brown) and the evaluation team (Rose). The EEF had a particular model of educational evaluation, which privileges randomised control trials (RCT) as a method. Intervention and evaluation teams are brought together in the development stages, so that the intervention can be delivered in such a way to allow for an RCT evaluation. The involvement of the EEF makes this model of partnership particularly interesting: the EEF prescribes the outcome measures and scope of the evaluation, and is strongly involved in determining the design of the intervention and evaluation before leaving the intervention and evaluation teams to conduct the project.
The RLC intervention brought together small clusters of primary schools, and worked with key members of staff (“evidence champions”) in each school over the course of two years to develop research informed practice. The intervention team conducted four workshops each year with evidence champions in each cluster, to plan and support delivery of evidence-informed action research in their schools. The intervention team worked with 58 schools in 14 clusters, with another 58 schools being allocated to the control condition of the RCT. Control schools did not receive the intervention, but received a financial incentive for providing evaluation data. The evaluation team collected survey data from teachers in all schools, on their research-informed practice, and pupil attainment data from all schools which the EEF prescribed as the primary outcome measure. The process evaluation included surveys of the evidence champions, and case studies of six intervention schools and two control schools. The evaluation team also attended the initial school recruitment events organised by the intervention team at the start of the project, and attended one example of each workshop.
