Parliament and Policy: June 2014

Mentions of the Sutton Trust and EEF

11 June – The Meritocrat’s Manifesto 

The Meritocrat’s Manifesto, written by Dominic Raab (Conservative MP for Esher and Walton) and published by The Social Market Foundation cites the Sutton Trust throughout.

View the publication here.

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16 June – Education Questions

The Sutton Trust’s early years research was mentioned in an exchange between Labour MP Alex Cunningham and Conservative children’s minister Liz Truss on child care.

Click here to view the discussion.

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18 June – The Education Select Committee report 

The Education Select Committee report on Working Class Children makes several references to the Sutton Trust and EEF, highlighting our evidence to the committee, and our Baby Bonds and Parent Power reports.

Read the full report here or see below for direct mentions…

Page 31…

“The Sutton Trust recently reported that 40% of children miss out on “the parentingneeded to succeed in life”, and that “securely attached children are more resilient topoverty, family instability, parental stress and depression. Boys growing up in poverty aretwo and a half times less likely to display behaviour problems at school if they formedsecure attachments with parents in their early years”

Page 36…

“A December 2013 report for the Sutton Trust found that although less than half of parents in each social group had made use of school attainment data in choosing schools for their children, it was disproportionately middle class parents who did so.The report notes that “the assumption underpinning ‘parental choice’ is that parents are all equally informed and engaged in active choice-making”, but Professor Francis explained that some working class parents behaved in ways that were more associated with the middle classes.”

Page 43…

“Joint written evidence from the Sutton Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) highlighted the ‘EEF toolkit’’ as a way of schools assessing the effectiveness of interventions...We see the EEF Toolkit as a positive development which will help schools to make informed decisions about how to make best use of pupil premium funding. This will be particularly important to support the roll-out of the pupil premium to early years settings”

Page 51.

“Dr Kevan Collins (Chief Executive, Education Endowment Foundation) noted that “we do not necessarily have incentives to encourage our very best teachers or our best teaching to be supporting the children who are hardest to teach or have the most to learn”.

Page 53…

“Evidence summarised in the Sutton Trust-EEF Toolkit notes that “higher parental engagement is related with better attainment outcomes, but increasing low parental engagement is challenging”.

Page 57...

“We are encouraged that the Sutton Trust has commissioned work to investigate the quantitative evidence for the effect of careers education and guidance, including analysis by social class, and we look forward to receiving the results in due course.”  

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24 June – 2014

Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt cited Sutton Trust research on teaching in his Fabian Society lecture on education policy.

“Research from the Sutton Trust has shown that without social capital or parental input to fall back upon, teacher quality can mean as much as a year’s difference to the learning progress of disadvantaged children.

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“Because what that Sutton Trust and London School of Economics research also highlighted is that if we could just raise the performance of the least effective teachers already in the system merely to the average, then England would rank in the top five education systems in the world in reading and mathematics.”

Read the full text here.