Pearson-Exploring-Effective-Pedagogy-in-Primary-Schools

The methodsThe EPPSE study is uniquely placed to investigate children’s academic attainment andsocio-behavioural development and the factors that influence these, as it has monitored over3,000 children from when they started pre-school/school (age 3/5) until they left compulsoryschooling (age 16). The EPPSE study, as a mixed methods (Sammons et al., 2005; Siraj-Blatchfordet al., 2006) programme of research, is concerned with both what children achieve and howthey achieve and become engaged learners. The pre-school years of the EPPSE children,including the influence of the quality of their pre-school, their familial characteristics and therichness of their early years Home Learning Environment (HLE), have been well documented(Sylva et al., 2010). The findings, which also demonstrated the importance of early experiences,have had a profound influence on national policy (Taggart et al., 2008), leading to the expansionof pre-school and universal provision for all 3-5 year olds. The case studies of effective practice(Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2002; 2003), which described types of pedagogical practice evident in“highly effective” and “good” pre-school settings, have had a profound influence on practitioners(see Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2008) and how young children are taught (QCA/DfEE, 2000).A second phase of the research, the Effective Pre-School and Primary Education study (Sylva etal., 2008), began when the EPPSE children moved into primary school. Whilst still exploring anycontinuing influence of pre-school and the contribution of the family to children’s academic andsocial-behavioural outcomes, the research questions expanded to explore the contribution ofthe child’s primary school to these same outcomes (Sammons et al., 2006; 2007a, b; c; 2008a, b).This raised some methodological problems. During the pre-school phase, the quality of the141 individual pre-school settings was measured using two observation rating scales: The EarlyChildhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R: Harms et al., 1998) and the EarlyChildhood Environment Rating Scale-Extension (ECERS-E: Sylva et al., 2003: 2011). The richinformation from these ratings (Sylva et al., 1999a, b), coupled with child outcomes data and aneffectiveness score for each setting (Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2003), informed the selection of 12settings for an intense study of pedagogical practices evident in “excellent” and “good” settings.When EPPE 3-11 sought to investigate the pedagogical practices in primary schools, it could notreplicate this approach as the 3,000 children had moved into over 850 schools. The childrenmoved from the targeted six Local Authorities to many regions across the country and, unlikethe pre-school where there were concentrated numbers of EPPSE children in a setting, manyof the primary schools had a “singleton” or a small number of EPPSE pupils. In order to studyprimary practices, the research needed to investigate a range of schools to get as full a pictureas possible of the types of practice undertaken by teachers in their classrooms, but sendingresearchers to such a large number of schools to conduct observations of “quality” was bothunaffordable and unmanageable.Evidence from Research | 9