The movement ‘toward the use of evidence in education in Europe’ (Pellegrini and Vivanet, 2021) is ubiquitous in England. Despite the ongoing and polarising debate about the value and meaning of evidence-based policy and practice, schools attempt to fulfil the expectations set out by policy makers who promote the use of scientific evidence (Wiseman et al., 2010:1). In doing so, school leaders often allocate a portion of their limited funds to evidence-based teaching interventions with many time-poor settings turning to commercially available packaged products. These are bought with the intention of making education more effective, or doing ‘what works’ in the classroom (Biesta, 2020:51), a concept made prevalent by the view that the medical-model can provide the solution to all of the problems in education (Biesta, 2010:492).  

As a result, to ‘affect a scientific legitimacy’, intervention products can often draw on neuroscience, cognitive science and/or psychology (Geake, 2009:1) as is the case with products such as Building Learning Power and the Thrive approach (Claxton, 2002; Thrive, 2021).   

In the past, intervention products such as these have been added to teacher pedagogy, only to find that the theories on which they rely have later been questioned. For example, it is argued that the mandated method of teaching phonics in early years and primary education ‘is not sufficiently underpinned by research evidence’ (Wyse & Bradbury, 2022:1). This situation is not uncommon. A further example is the wide-spread practice in the 2000s of tailoring teaching to support students’ individual learning styles, the basis of which is now considered to be a neuromyth and is widely discredited (Kirschner, 2016). While the teaching of learning styles has abated, the effects, mainly the misconception that one has a particular mode of learning, remain (Sumeraki and Kaminske, 2020).  It is important that we consider the possible effects that readily adopting evidence-based strategies such as these can have, not just on students and their learning but, on teachers and their teaching. 

This problem is especially topical as in recent years, the government in England has allocated more than a billion pounds ‘catch up funding’ for learning interventions in primary and secondary schools across the country (DfE,2020b).  The use of such interventions is expected to help address the many hours of lost teaching time experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic (DfE, 2020a; DfE,2020b). ​ Given the instability in which education has been operating, more knowledge is needed to better understand how these evidence-based products, in which our schools both trust and invest, come to be used.​ Understanding the processes through which learning science makes its way from the research into teaching practice could help us to understand the incentive for its use and, if deemed appropriate, implement it more effectively. 

I am currently in the final stage of my doctoral study, in which I have been investigating the relationship between evidence and teaching pedagogy, specifically through how information is presented and changed. Within a critical discourse analysis methodology, I have drawn on Bernstein’s theories on the structuring of pedagogic discourse, specifically the process of recontextualization (Bernstein, 1990), to explore the notion of evidence-based practice as it applies to teacher knowledge and identity.   I questioned the use of ‘brain-based’ (Geake, 2009) interventions and what their use might suggest about the evidence that is perceived as valuable and how that might be being transferred in schools in England. To investigate this process, I conducted key informant interviews with four members of staff involved in converting research into practice in four primary schools. I spoke to teaching assistants, teachers, curriculum leads, governors and special education needs coordinators. Following these interviews, I have drawn on Fairclough’s discourse analysis framework to consider each participant’s ‘relation to knowledge, their relation with others, and their relation with themselves’ (Fairclough, 2003:29).  It is argued that ‘to research meaning-making, one needs to look at interpretations of texts as well as texts themselves’ (Fairclough, 2003: 15) and so I have also collected and analysed ten pieces of documentary data which gives insight into evidence-based interventions which have been, or are currently being, used in English schools.  

Currently, I am well positioned to prepare a presentation which details my initial findings around the effects of evidence-based interventions on the perceptions of teachers’ profession, professionalism, and professionality.   Early indications are that the reliance on these types of evidence-based interventions is a form of ‘complexity reduction’ (Biesta, 2020:40), one which draws from a specific form of knowledge and which arguably seeks to provide certainty in education. At this point, I am considering how policymakers’ emphasis on evidence-based practice and interventions could be leading to ’a narrowing of what counts as educational knowledge’ with the effect of potentially ‘deprofessionalising teachers’ (Hordern, 2019:2).  A possible result is that in reducing complexity, the range of pedagogies available to teachers is limited. With fewer strategies from which to draw there is an impact on teachers' ability to adapt to the unique contexts and diverse students which they support.

Bernstein, B. (1990) Class, Codes and Control Volume IV: The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse, Routledge, New York.    Biesta, G. (2010) Why ‘what works’ still won’t work: from evidence-based education to value-based education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29, pp. 491-503.    Biesta, G (2020) Educational research: An Unorthodox Introduction, Bloomsbury, London.  Claxton, G. (2002) Building Learning Power, TLO Limited, Bristol.   Department for Education, (2020a) Guidance: Coronavirus (Covid-19) catch-up premium, available at:  https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-catch-up-premium [accessed 18/09/2020].    Department for Education, (2020b) Billion pound Covid catch-up plan to tackle impact of lost teaching time, available at: Billion pound Covid catch-up plan to tackle impact of lost teaching time - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) [accessed 15/01/2022].    Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual analysis for social research, Routledge, Oxon.   Geake, J. (2009) The Brain at School: Educational Neuroscience in the Classroom. Berkshire: Open University Press.    Hordern, J. (2019) Knowledge, Evidence, and the Configuration of Educational Practice, Education Sciences, 9(70), pp. 1-11.    Kirschner, P.A. (2016) Stop propagating the learning styles myth, Computers & Education, 106 (1), pp. 166-171.   Pellegrini, M. and Vivanet, G. (2021) Evidence-Based Policies in Education: Initiatives and Challenges in Europe, ECNU Review of Education, 4(1), pp. 25-45. Thrive (2021) About Thrive, Available at: About Thrive and our approach to wellbeing - The Thrive Approach [Accessed on 18/05/2021].   Wisemen, A., Whitty, G., Tobin, J. and Tsui, A. (2010) The use of evidence for educational policymaking: global contexts and international trends. Review of Research in Education, 34, pp. 1-24.    Wyse, D. and Bradbury, A. (2022) Reading wars or reading reconciliation? A critical examination of robust research evidence, curriculum policy and teachers’ practices for teaching phonics and reading, Review of Education, 10, pp. 1-53.