A Research Revolution – NIoT at the CST Data and Insights conference

At the National Institute of Teaching, we are dedicated to delivering exceptional professional development for teachers and leaders, so that pupils receive the best education possible. We are proud of our commitment to ensuring that our research programmes are school-led, which is why you will often find the Research and Best Practice team discussing our research at educational conferences across England. Not only is this an opportunity to share what we do with a wider audience, but it also enables us to gather valuable insights into the education sector and feedback on what we’re doing. 

Shaun Dillon, Calum Davey, and Claire Maud were invited to discuss the Teacher Education Dataset (TED) and the associated research project, Teacher Improvement through Data and Evaluation (TIDE), at the annual CST Data and Insights conference in Birmingham on Thursday 19th June. The theme of the conference was ‘The coming wave – preparing together’ and brought trust leaders from data management and school improvement together with sector experts to explore the changing landscape of school data-ecosystems. Featuring sessions on data quality and insights, and the opportunities and risks of AI, the conference provided an opportunity to discuss the governance and infrastructure needed to support this changing data landscape.

Research Revolution: Unlocking the power of school data 

As both TED and TIDE represent innovative approaches to researching education data in England, we facilitated a workshop titled ‘Research Revolution: Unlocking the power of school data’. During this session, we shared the rationale behind the ground-breaking Teacher-Education Dataset (TED), which will develop into an extensive longitudinal database of data routinely collected by schools, such as pupil attainment scores, that can be used for educational research. Shaun shared details of the technical infrastructure, emphasising our commitment to data privacy and security, and ensuring that information is anonymised so no individual within the dataset will ever be identifiable. We are collaborating with the Bennett Institute of Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford to develop OpenSAFELY Schools, a trusted research environment that has already been effectively implemented in the healthcare sector. By adhering to the Five Safes framework (safe people, safe projects, safe settings, safe data and safe outputs), the OpenSAFELY Schools platform will enable researchers to ask questions of the TED and obtain aggregated outputs without ever having access to the data.  

An overview of our research funded by the Nuffield Foundation followed, with Calum explaining how the TED will be used to answer questions such as ‘can we measure teaching quality using pupil attainment data’, ‘which school practices and characteristics are associated with teaching quality’, and ‘can AI tools help us to more effectively identify the teaching practices associated with teaching quality?’.

Embedding a School-Led Approach in Research and Practice   

As our guiding principle is to be school-led in everything we do, we were joined by Sara-Jayne Martin, National Lead of Research and Best Practice at Oasis Community Learning (OCL) and James Bexton, Head of Information and Data at Trinity Multi-Academy Trust for a panel discussion. Sara-Jayne has been working closely with us this year to develop and distribute a staff survey across the primary and secondary schools at OCL, and James was invited to share his perspective on the TED onboarding and data sharing process. An interesting discussion ensued, with delegates asking how we would gather additional data not routinely collected in the school MIS (Management Information System), such as staff wellbeing surveys and curriculum information. 

Conclusion 

Our participation at the CST Data and Insights conference highlighted the innovative strides being made in educational research through projects like TED, TIDE, and OS-Schools. By fostering collaboration with sector leaders and prioritising robust data governance, we are paving the way for impactful, data-driven improvements in teaching and learning across England’s schools.