What does the EEF do?
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) is an independent grant-making charity dedicated to breaking the link between family income and educational achievement, ensuring that children and young people from all backgrounds can fulfil their potential and make the most of their talents.
We aim to raise the attainment of 3-18 year-olds facing disadvantage by generating evidence of what works most effectively and cost-effectively, funding rigorous trials of promising but untested programmes and approaches. We then support schools, nurseries and colleges across the country to put that evidence to good use.
We do this in four ways:
1. Supporting teachers to use high-quality research and data to inform their practice and boost student attainment - our Families of Schools database, the Sutton Trust-EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit and its Early Years companion, our evidence reports on key themes, and our DIY Evaluation Guide are all designed to help teachers identify attainment gaps and potential ways to tackle them;
2. Making grants to test the impact of innovative projects and generate new evidence of ‘what works’ - our grant-funding aims to support innovative projects with promising evidence that they are having a measurable impact on the attainment (or a directly related outcome) of children and young people;
3. Publishing independent, rigorous evaluations to build our understanding of how to improve teaching and learning - we publish, openly and in full, the reports of independent evaluators into all the projects we fund so that teachers can have confidence in the findings we present;
4. Scaling up promising approaches and programmes to achieve maximum reach across the country - as confidence increases in a project's positive impact through the trials we fund, so we work to scale up its delivery to reach as many disadvantaged children and young people as possible.
