Search

This report sets out findings and lessons learned from an ambitious and innovative programme of work funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), Arts Council England (ACE) and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (PHF). At the core of the ?'Learning About Culture' programme are five school-based randomised controlled trials of arts-based education interventions delivered over four years, involving around 8,500 children in 400 state schools across England. These trials represent the biggest study of its kind ever undertaken in the UK and provide much-needed insight into both what works and how it works. The projects are The Power of Pictures -- Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), The Craft of Writing -- Arvon, University of Exeter, the Open University, Speech Bubbles -- London Bubble, The Young Journalist Academy - Paradigm Arts and First Thing Music -- Tees Valley Music Service. They have been independently evaluated by a collaboration between the UCL Institute of Education and the Behavioural Insights Team, who worked with the developer teams, the EEF and the RSA, to design trials that would maximise what we can learn from the individual studies and reveal overarching findings from the trials relevant to evaluators, funders, arts-based education organisations and schools. [This report was co-produced by the Behavioural Insights Team of the University College London (UCL).]

The Speech Bubbles (SB) intervention is a Key Stage 1 (KS1) drama and storytelling intervention aimed at supporting children's communication skills, confidence and wellbeing. The intervention was targeted at pupils aged 5-7 in KS1 (Year 1 or Year 2) in primary schools in England, who had been identified by their teachers as having difficulties with, or lacking confidence in, communicating, or having poor attention and listening skills. This impact evaluation consisted of an individually randomised controlled trial (RCT). Year 1 and Year 2 pupils with poor communication skills (as identified by teachers using SB referral guidance) were randomly allocated to either receive the SB programme (treatment arm), or continue with their curriculum as normal (control arm). Pupils in the two arms were compared on reading attainment and oral communication as two primary outcomes, and on social skills and creative self-efficacy as two secondary outcomes. Assuming successful randomisation, an RCT is the least biased method to estimate intervention effects and make causal inferences. In the implementation and process evaluation (IPE), multiple sources of data were collected and triangulated from six case study schools to answer the research questions. This consisted of semi-structured interviews with four staff members at each case study school, unstructured interviews with participating children, an observation of an SB lesson, a survey for teaching assistants (TAs), review of intervention manuals and guidance, and collection of administrative data. [This report was produced with the Behavioural Insights Team of the University College London (UCL) (United Kingdom), Institute of Education (IOE). The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) contributed to funding for this evaluation.]

The Craft of Writing (CoW) is an intervention aimed at improving the writing skills, writing self-efficacy and writing creativity (ideation) of primary school pupils by developing teachers as 'writers' and improving their own writing practice and their teaching of writing. This intervention was delivered to Year 5 pupils between June 2018 and July 2019 by the University of Exeter, the Open University and Arvon, a creative writing charity. This evaluation was designed to estimate the effect of participating in the Craft of Writing (CoW) over the course of one school year on pupils' writing skills. The CoW is an intervention to develop teachers as writers, thereby improving their own writing practice and their teaching of writing (more details below in the Intervention section). This trial was designed as a two-arm clustered randomised trial with randomisation occurring at the level of the school. This level of randomisation was selected since entire classes participate in the programme and thus the risk of contamination within schools is very high. The two arms were: (1) participation in the CoW (treatment); and (2) business-as-usual (control). Blocking was used in the randomisation to improve cross-arm comparability of schools, to improve precision of estimates, and to allow schools that sign up early to receive their allocation sooner than they otherwise would (this is important because of the nature of the intervention requiring as much notice of allocation as possible to be given to teachers, given it requires activity outside of their normal working hours; see the Intervention section for more details). Initially, the authors had planned to look at the long-term effects of participating in the CoW after one further year, looking at results from the end of KS2 national curriculum tests in English grammar, punctuation and spelling. [This report was produced with the Behavioural Insights Team of the University College London (UCL) (United Kingdom), Institute of Education (IOE). The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) contributed to funding for this evaluation.]