ABSTRACT
Originally funded by the Sutton Trust and subsequently supported by the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF), the Teaching and Learning Toolkit is now in widespread use in England with about two-thirds of headteachers saying they have consulted it. Similar approaches to evidence synthesis and translation, and reference to evidence in policy-making, are growing in popularity, reflecting a global movement towards more effective engagement with research and evidence. The Toolkit has also been imitated worldwide and extended to other areas such as crime and justice, or widening participation in higher education. In the Toolkit approach, an inventory of approaches or programmes is created, and categorised in terms of the evidence for their effectiveness, cost and impact. These summaries are often then simply made available or publicised for users, providing an overview of, or an index to, more robust evidence. This leads to some engagement, but there as yet is little evidence about how far approaches such as the Toolkit then influence practice, and none at all so far that they lead to improved outcomes for children and young people in education. Toolkit use is chiefly evidenced by downloads and mentions by practitioners, or by anecdotal accounts of influence on decisions in schools. So how effective is this essentially passive approach to evidence transfer, and what more could be done? This chapter sets out the background to development of the Toolkit and a personal perspective on its strengths and weaknesses. By contrasting it with other similar approaches, a model of evidence adoption and use is presented to indicate some of the underlying tensions in evidence-informed practice. A section considers the evidence of uptake of the Toolkit, and what has influenced this in the UK context, as well as some of the factors which have led to its adoption in other countries, such as Australia, Chile and Spain. A final section provides some reflections on how the Toolkit, as an example of passive transfer of modified evidence, might be developed to increase effective engagement and use.
