For a long time, Jane Flood was keen to use academic research in her classroom.

But good classroom intentions, the early years teacher at Copythorne Infant School in Southampton acknowledges, are not enough: she needed backing from her headteacher. “Time is a thorny issue, isn’t it?” she says. “You need time to do it in. It seems to be where this sort of work always falls down.”

This is part of a broader problem identified by Chris Brown, a lecturer in teaching and research at the UCL Institute of Education. Dr Brown spoke to 696 teachers in 79 primary schools, to examine their experiences of putting academic research into practice.

A cultured approach

More and more teachers are recognising the value of using research to inform their classroom practice. However, Dr Brown found that it was almost impossible for teachers to do this, unless they were backed by their headteachers.

“If you want to have a research-informed culture in schools, it’s about school leaders,” he explains.

This is something Ms Flood has seen first-hand. “We’ve been dabbling with research for two, three years,” she says of her school. “But teachers haven’t really known where it was coming from.”

Working with Dr Brown, Copythorne’s senior leaders decided to change their approach. They wanted to address the fact that only 60 per cent of summer-born children were achieving early-learning goals for writing at the end of Year 1, compared with 83 per cent of autumn-born children. In an attempt to close the gap, they took on a school-wide project.

“The leaders have been getting teachers to buy into this,” Ms Flood says. “We’re all here to improve outcomes for children. So you tell teachers that’s what this will do, and they’re, ‘Oh, yeah. I want to do that’.

Leaders have been very good at selling it to us - persuading us that it was something useful to do.”

By the end of the year, 86 per cent of summer-born children were achieving their early-learning goals in writing.

Ms Flood followed research recommendations and started teaching her pupils phonics in late September: considerably earlier than in previous years. For the first six weeks, summer-born children’s parents sat in on these lessons. Children were then given extra work to complete at home, with their parents’ help.

But there are also other, more practical ways in which it can be very difficult for schools to embrace research without the full backing of the headteacher.

“The school leader holds the purse strings,” says Dr Brown. “They hold access to resources. They control the timetable: when teachers are free to collaborate. If you want to create change, you cannot create change without resources, structures, procedures, policy. And those all come from the top.”

If you want to create change, you cannot create change without resources, structures, procedures, policy. And those all come from the top

‘Cogs spinning in space’

Dr Brown is not the only one to have noticed this. “You can have individual teachers doing individual enquiry programmes,” says Jonathan Sharples, senior researcher at the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). “But, unless they’re linked into leadership, all you have are lots and lots of cogs, spinning in space.”

For example, the EEF recently ran pilot studies looking at the most effective ways to use teaching assistants in school. But, in some schools, responsibility for these pilots was delegated to a single teacher, whose influence was limited.

“You’ll only get so far like that,” Dr Sharples says. “Then you need to make changes in contracts, or working hours for staff. Or put training in place. Even possibly challenging some of the teachers about what the role of teaching assistants is.

“What can seem to be quite straight-forward recommendations can involve lots and lots of elements coming together. So it quickly becomes a leadership issue. And it flounders, unless you have leadership buy-in.”

Senior leaders can also make it easier for staff to find the research they need. “Access to research is often the first hurdle that people fall at,” says Cathy Walter, assistant director of education at the Girls’ Day Schools Trust network of independent schools.

Ms Walter regularly sends out summaries of the latest research to all her member schools. “People don’t have the time to go and find these big academic documents,” she says. “That access is something that we need to address straight away.”

Similarly, Ms Flood has been awarded extra non-teaching time to spend on research, and has set up a blog to disseminate her findings through the school.

Heads can also invite teachers to suggest ideas of their own. “Essentially, become a lab for school improvement,” Dr Brown says.

“It’s about teacher professionalism. Rather than being told how to teach, teachers themselves can take that on board and become masters of their own destiny.”

@adibloom_tes

• Dr Brown presented his ideas at this year’s British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration conference