Date:
02/10/2023
Your Name:
Owen Carter
Position:
Director
Solution Name:
ImpactEd Evaluation
Legal Structure:
Social Enterprise
Main Funding Source:
Several. Predominantly contracts with education organisations and schools – a mixture of annual subscriptions and consultancy contracts. Supplemented by a small amount of grant funding.
Phase(s) of Education:
5-18 with some work with older students (up to 25)
Number of Students:
c. 500,000
Purposes of Education supported:
To support schools and organisations in making better decisions about how to positively impact pupils’ educational outcomes; social and emotional outcomes, including wellbeing; and life chances, including work readiness.
Solution Description:
ImpactEd Evaluation helps analyse the impact of programmes, processes and interventions, to help our partners do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
In our education system, we invest huge amounts of time, money and energy in different programmes and interventions to improve outcomes for pupils. Yet far too often, we don’t know what is working – and what isn’t.
We exist to address this evaluation deficit, helping organisations and schools to better understand what is working to make a difference to the lives of young people. We do this through a combination of hands-on partnership, training and consultancy, and our School Impact Platform which makes monitoring and evaluation quicker, easier and more effective.
Solution Origin:
ImpactEd Evaluation is part of the ImpactEd Group, which supports organisations to make better decisions using high quality evidence. Since being founded in 2018, ImpactEd Evaluation has worked with over half a million pupils, 20,000 teachers, 1,500 schools and 150 different purpose-driven organisations, to build capacity for evaluation.
This work began from seeing the poor quality with which schools and other organisations were able to measure their impact. Over a 6-month research process we conducted when setting up the organisation, only 3% of schools that we interviewed were confident in their impact evaluation. Similarly, a survey of 1,000 charities found that only 25% had been able to use evaluation to improve their services.
If we can help schools and education organisations to address this evaluation deficit, it should help teachers to work smarter, not harder, on what makes the biggest difference, and ultimately ensure young people are supported in the best ways possible.
Potential for systemic impact (EXCLUDING Equity)?
Ultimately, improved pupil outcomes and life chances through:
Teachers and school leaders better able to target resources to pupil needs (e.g. on wellbeing)
Schools and organisations understanding which interventions are making the biggest difference, using this to inform their improvement processes
The sector as a whole becoming better at identifying what works at an early stage of innovation
Does the solution improve Equity? How?
Yes – those pupils that are most disadvantaged are those for whom the support offered by education and intervention matters most. For example, a significant proportion of educational support channeled to disadvantaged students is through the £2.44 billion of Pupil Premium funding allocated annually. If we could increase the effectiveness of this funding usage even by a small proportion, this could have a correspondingly large effect on narrowing attainment gaps.
Barriers to adoption relating to Accountability Rules and Funding Formulae:
No specific budget for research and evaluation work; potential sense that this is not “core business” for schools/organisations as much as e.g. curriculum delivery, and does not form part of any inspection framework as a result (beyond PP).
Other barriers to adoption:
Operational challenges in schools leading to workload crunches where strategic activity of this nature can be deprioritised.
Additional Comments?
With our initiative, it’s important to emphasise that we are not delivering interventions to children. Instead, our role is about creating the conditions for those innovations to be most successful. This is as much about changing the systems around the child as it is directly supporting the child.
Thanks Owen! ImpactEd is a wonderful example of an innovative solution that emerged from grass roots and has improved our education system in a new and unexpected way. Congratulations on your success and for your service to the wider education community.