About RATED

RATED is the acronym for Research-informed Approaches to Tackling Educational Disadvantage, a consortium of academics, teachers, and educators who collaboratively work together to reduce educational inequalities and disadvantage using evidence-based approaches.

How RATED came to be

The first collaboration

In December 2018 Dr Claire Tyson, Teacher Researcher from Homewood School and Sixth Form Centre, attended the University of Sussex feedback session for the EEF Writing about Values (WAV) project, the meeting was hosted by Dr Matthew Easterbrook and his team.

Homewood was one of the schools who participated in Writing about Values during 2017-2018.  WAV is an intervention designed to improve the academic performance of disadvantaged pupils by tackling negative stereotypes related to disadvantage which can undermine pupil performance. During English lessons, pupils were asked to write short essays about values of importance to them, such as friendships and honesty. All pupils participated, but an effect was only expected for disadvantaged groups.

The trial had found that there was a positive benefit for Free School Meals students and at that time  further analysis was still ongoing at University of Sussex.  At the end of the feedback session the representatives from the attending schools were invited to maintain contact and Claire and Matthew discussed running a similar project at the Homewood School Sixth Form.  This would not  be a full scale randomised trial but a smaller project with a specific focus as there was already good evidence that this is effective at KS4. 

Their aims for this project were to find out  (1) How schools can implement WAV as part of the EEF toolkit  (2) How it benefits our FSM students at KS5.  Due to the school closures caused by the COVID pandemic this project was delayed and was delivered in 2021-2022.  Working together as a collaboration between a school and an HEI was a valuable experience.  In her role as a teacher researcher Claire was able to facilitate the delivery of the intervention, act as a link between the research team and the school by providing the training for form tutors, ensure good practice for GDPR and process the data for sharing with the University of Sussex.  In his role as HEI researcher Matthew provided the trial materials, organised ethical approval and supervised the data analysis.  Communication was most frequently by email or google meetings.  Claire recorded her experiences using memos and wrote a monthly researcher update for her line manager and senior leadership team.

The idea of a consortium

This research collaboration was the nucleus around which the idea of a consortium was created.  The successful experience of working together encouraged Claire to reach out to her wider network of BERA contacts to enquire if other researchers were interested in collaborating with a secondary school.  The initial email call yielded responses from three additional researchers, Dr Tom Perry (University of Warwick), Dr Amelia Hempel-Jorgensen (Open University), Dr Carmel Capewell (Oxford Brooks)  and a (Google) meeting was held on 7th July 2022 to explore their shared interest in working together to improve the outcomes for disadvantaged students. 

It was quickly apparent that the group had mutual research interests and that they brought different perspectives and skills to the team.  At that first meeting it was agreed that the aims of the consortium would be:

• To form an effective research partnership between several HE institutions and a secondary school that is both academically credible and effective in bringing about improved outcomes for staff and students.
• This was framed as a ‘research community coming together to create new knowledge’.
• To facilitate knowledge exchange between researchers and teacher practitioners.
• To reflect on this experience and create a theoretical framework or model of collaboration for wider dissemination.

The ethos of the team became one of openness towards each other’s perspectives and a willingness to be flexible about working practices.  With the sad loss of Amelia Hempel-Jorgensen we were joined by Dr Alison Glover from the OU. When  Carmel moved on to focus on other projects we welcomed Dr Elizabeth Hidson from University of Sunderland.  Lewis Doyle, a PhD candidate from University of Sussex, has also become an engaged and central  member of the group.  The name of the consortium was the brainchild of Tom Perry who came up with the acronym RATED which stands for Research-Informed Approaches to Tackling Educational Disadvantage. 

During an early meeting slides were presented by each person to share their research interests and experiences.  It was noted that there were some nice intersections within our group, these included our shared interests in inequalities and disadvantage, the effect of bias, and the use of research and evidence to improve education policies and practice.

The development of our first project

Since September 2022 regular meetings have been held via Google Meetings, hosted by Claire Tyson and minutes are kept as a shared archive on a Google Drive.  Claire, as a teacher researcher, has dedicated research capacity and took on responsibility for organising the meetings and sending out diary reminders.

Initially we explored themes of interest and discussed possible funding opportunities.  Building on the WAV project and with a focus on the psychology of classroom inequality in mind we examined the current professional development materials at Homewood School. Although bias is a difficult topic to approach it does need to be tackled head on as it tends to perpetuate existing inequalities. We asked ourselves how we could encourage teachers to look more closely at their own practice and challenge their unconscious biases.  The idea that we could co-create new knowledge with teachers was identified as important and potentially avoids some of the common pitfalls of doing research ‘on education’ with those ‘in education’.

It was agreed that we would probably take a multi-method approach to the co-creation of knowledge with teachers  The diverse approaches that we could use included case studies, video technology, teacher interviews, and summaries of research evidence.

Our meetings in Autumn 2022 were used to check that everyone was happy with the direction of travel of the group and to explore funding opportunities that we could apply for, as there are strong links with practice and teacher development so funding opportunities for translation of research into practice were of interest to us.  We were successful in a funding application for fast track funding from University of Sussex.   The Fast Track Engagement Fund is designed to provide short-term, quick turn-around funds for Sussex faculty to generate additional impact from their research or co-create new research with organisations outside the institution. It provides support for engagement and/or knowledge exchange with external stakeholders. The consortium received £3,500 funding which supported a literature review and the co-creation of a rubric to support teachers when they reflect on their recorded lessons. A talented Sixth Form student was commissioned for the graphic design of the new rubrics and we are now actively seeking funding for larger scale evaluations.