Which Interventions Actually Improve Educational Outcomes?

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has just published a new 'round up' of their research which looks at whether children's and parents' attitudes, aspirations and behaviours (AABs) for education really do affect attainment; and whether interventions focused on these can reduce the attainment gap. Key messages from their research were:

• It was not possible to establish a clear causal relationship between AABs and children's educational outcomes, particularly due to the quality of evidence, which offers limited support for the impact of most interventions.
• Evidence supports interventions focused on parental involvement in children's education to improve outcomes. The immediate focus should be on rolling out and closely monitoring these.
• There is mixed evidence on the impact of interventions focused on extra-curricular activities, mentoring, children's self-belief and motivation. Further development of such interventions should be trialled alongside evaluations of effectiveness.
• There is little evidence of impact for interventions focused on things like addressing children's general attitudes to education or the amount of paid work children do during term time. 

You can download a summary of the evidence here: http://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/education-achievement-poverty-summary.pdf