The Trials of Evidence-based Education explores the promise, limitations and achievements of evidence-based policy and practice, as the attention of funders moves from a sole focus on attainment outcomes to political concern about character-building and wider educational impacts.

Providing a detailed look at the pros, cons and areas for improvement in evidence-based policy and practice, this book includes consideration of the following:

• What is involved in a robust evaluation for education.


• The issues in conducting trials and how to assess the trustworthiness of research findings.


• New methods for the design, conduct, analysis and use of evidence from trials and examining their implications.


• What policy-makers, head teachers and practitioners can learn from the evidence to inform practice.

In this well-structured and thoughtful text, the results and implications of over 20 studies conducted by the authors are combined with a much larger number of studies from their systematic reviews, and the implications are spelled out for the research community, policy-makers, schools wanting to run their own evaluations, and for practitioners using evidence.