In schools, what matters in terms of accessing and using research day-to-day is knowing why you are looking, and matching your goals to reputable sites that do curation for you.

Here are some signposts.

If you want to grow your own and your colleagues’ capacity for research and evidence-informed practice, you need to go to sources that are committed to that. The Chartered College of Teaching has put this mission at its core and has recently launched the first of a series of web-based summaries, tools and resources to support teachers wanting to use research to enhance their pupils’ learning.

First stop is a focus on feedback, mathematics and continuing professional development and learning (CPDL) - more coming soon.

CCOT membership also gets you access to many original research articles, but it’s important to bear in mind that these have often been written for a research, rather than a practice, audience. (Educationalist Dylan Wiliam jokes that for most journal articles there are only six readers, and they include the peer reviewers and the author’s granny.)

Get infected by research

If you want to access examples of teachers’ own research that has been filtered for rigour and for usability (teachers’ research is infectious - like laughter rather than flu), try the national Teacher Research Panel section on the CUREE website.

You can also find examples of teachers’ case studies illustrating larger-scale research, and the work of learning theorists like Vygotsky and Bruner in the Research for Teachers features there.

If you want an answer to a burning question about how best to achieve a specific aspiration for a specific group of learners, such as those who are socio-economically disadvantaged, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Toolkit is a great launch pad. It offers a cornucopia of rigorously evaluated evidence on the cost effectiveness of different interventions.

If your goal is scanning new and rigorous large-scale research as it emerges to develop an overview of the research landscape in your role as a leader in school, you need an updating service; try the Institute for Effective Education’s fortnightly teacher-friendly micro summaries.

If you can narrow your interest down to a subject, then subject associations and government-funded centres, such as the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) and the National Stem Learning Centre, are useful.

Some of the specialist websites focus on specific sub-groups, too - see, for example, the range of material related to dyslexia on the NCETM website.

In short, the clearer we are about what we want and why, the better placed we are to get it and others are to help us.

Philippa Cordingley is chief executive of CUREE. This is part one of a 24-part series that aims to help teachers become more research-informed