Learning and Skills

Helping colleagues in the learning and skills sector (LSS) to reflect on and enhance their practice is an area of rapidly-developing expertise for CUREE. We select the best of LSS-based research and put it into the hands of leaders, policy makers and practitioners, for example, through LSIS’s Inside Evidence. Our extensive knowledge of education research means we can recontextualise evidence from the schools sector which is also relevant post-school. Our networks and focus groups help ensure that the resources we produce create an appetite for evidence-informed practice across the sector and meet practitioners CPD needs. Here are some examples of projects involving the learning and skills sector.

Developing Teaching and Learning Conference, The Sixth Form College Farnborough.  June 2011, Hampshire Partnership INSET Day

Farnborough Sixth Form College ran their annual Developing Teaching and Learning Conference June 2011. CUREE demonstrated how our interactive routemaps help practitioners engage with evidence to develop approaches to teaching and learning. Read some of the presentations here

Teachers and research

Do you sometimes wonder whether researchers and the people who fund them ever listen to practitioners and policy makers in the sector? The National Teacher Research Panel (NTRP) was established in 2000 to:

  • Champion engagement in and with evidence as a means of improving quality and increasing student success;
  • Ensure that research funding and design takes account of practitioner needs.Two of the panel members  from FE had their research featured at the Panel's last national conference. Summaries of their work can be found below.

Does using voting sticks technology enhance teaching and learning? [PDF, 287 KB]

Strong roots healthy branches – Inspiring creativity in teaching for Early Years practitioners through peer coaching [PDF, 150 KB]

Research Tasters for the Learning and Skills Sector

CUREE has developed research tasters to help practitioners weave research findings on effective practice into their own teaching. Each taster:

  • highlights an intriguing or counter-intuitive nugget of high quality evidence
  • offers practical tools for gathering evidence about how your students experience these phenomena now
  • provides suggestions about next steps
  • provides related web-links for further information

Choose from the tasters below an area you and your colleagues would be interested in exploring:

How can adapting learning activities increase students’ thinking skills capacity?

How can we encourage students to contribute to discussions that support learning?

How can we ensure students of different abilities and aptitudes work well in a group?

How can we guide group discussion effectively?

How can we improve the effectiveness of learning support for adults?

How can we use enquiry to help learners become more confident and independent?

How can we use e-portfolios to enhance the learning of students attending more than one site?

What can we do to ensure young learners move onto the right course for them?

What helps to improve partnerships between employers and training providers?

What lessons on learning how to learn can adult students draw on?

Have you found these tasters useful? Are they something you might use for your own CPD? We’d welcome your feedback - just send your comments to kirsty.bond@curee.co.uk   

You will find additional tasters on the TLRP website for each of the different audiences in the sector; Further Education, 14-19 Education, Work Based Learning, Adult and Community Learning, and Offender Learning. Just follow this link http://www.tlrp.org/ls/

Coaching Skills and techniques for the 14 -19 Workforce Support Programme

CUREE has been using its coaching experience and resources to support the 14-19 Workforce Support programme managed by SSAT for LSIS. We have trained a specialist team at SSAT to use mentoring and coaching skills and techniques in ongoing 14-19 development work. We have adapted the Effective mentoring and coaching suite of tools and protocols in order to contextualise them specifically for 14 -19 development with new animations and tools that make specialist and collaborative coaching effective and connect professional development with student achievement. Colleagues in schools and colleges interested in accessing the introductory resources should contact their regional 14-19 support and development partner or register on the Diploma Support website (www.diploma-support.org/facetoface/coaching).

QCDA 14-19 Student Surveys and Focus Groups

As part of its work providing QCDA with evidence for curriculum development, CUREE has carried out a series of focus groups with Year 9 students to explore their experiences deciding on whether to take Diplomas, and the influences surrounding their choice. This report summarises the outcomes of the focus groups held with 38 students. It examines which students chose the diploma and why, what kind of support and guidance the students had received for making their choices and also whether this guidance and support had been helpful. The appendix contains the resources used during the focus groups to elicit students’ comments.

14-19 focus group report [PDF, 691 KB]

Sauce for the Goose

CUREE’s  publication “Sauce for the Goose - learning strategies that work for teachers as well as their pupils" was circulated to a team of pioneer CPD leaders linked to the Institute for Learning. The publication argues for a greater awareness of the benefits of professional learning – something already recognised in the learning and skills sector through the introduction of the 30-hour CPD entitlement – to access the pamphlet, click here.

The pamphlet argues that we need to plan for and think as hard about work based professional learning for teachers and tutors as we do about helping students to succeed, and highlights evidence about key things that make a difference.

Practitioner engagement in and/or with research and its impact on learners

Findings from a systematic research review throw new light on how practitioners in schools and colleges get involved in or with research, and about the impact which that has on their learners. This review explores:

  • the obstacles to practitioner engagement in and/or with research;
  • the forms of support that help practitioners overcome the obstacles; and
  • the range of approaches practitioners use to engage in and/or with research.

This systematic review was sponsored by the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE), the Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS), the Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education (CUREE), and the National Teacher Research Panel (NTRP) which is funded by the Department for Education (DfE), and drew on literature in the fields of education, health and social services.

Click here to view a summary of the report for the learning and skills sector.