Saffron Teaching School Hub Blog Feed - Evidence Led Practice Blog

What Pupils Learn When We Show Our Thinking

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:57:09 GMT

Schools are well practised at working in challenging contexts and still achieving strong academic outcomes for their pupils. The question many of us continue to grapple with is how we sustain and deepen this success while meeting the needs of pupils with SEND, disadvantage, and a wide range of confidence, motivation and prior attainment. When we strip this question back to its essentials, it almost always leads us to the same place. High quality teaching matters, and at the heart of that teaching sits modelling.

Helping Children Think About Their Thinking: Linking Metacognition and AFL at Heathlands Primary School

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 16:13:40 GMT

Darryl Crawley shares insights on one of the key teaching priorities at Heathlands: helping children understand how they learn, not only what they learn. Darryl explains how combining metacognition with high quality Assessment for Learning is strengthening pupils’ independence, confidence, and resilience across the school.

Strong Foundations in Writing

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:33:39 GMT

'Curriculums are often overloaded with activities that do not focus on helping children to build fluency in foundational knowledge and skills' (GOV.UK, October 2024)

I doubt any educator would question that ‘high quality education establishes the foundations for later success.’

However, Strong foundations in the first years of school - GOV.UK examined how schools secure the foundational knowledge children need by the end of KS1 to give them the best chance of educational success and found that some schools fall short of achieving this:

‘Children who begin school with the lowest starting points and those who start to fall behind are most affected by weaknesses in curriculum, teaching and assessment.’

Building Positive Behaviour with the EEF's 'Establish, Maintain, Restore' Framework

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:33:12 GMT

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) published a comprehensive research review in 2021 called Improving Behaviour In Schools. This guidance report has three sections.

The first details proactive strategies that can be deployed at classroom level to reduce the chance of misbehaviour occurring: a school-wide focus on these strategies should reduce efforts expended reacting to poor behaviour.

Next, the guidance covers reactive strategies for supporting pupils to improve their behaviour when they have misbehaved or have a chronic issue with their behaviour in school.

Finally, the guidance covers implementation. Implementing approaches to behaviour strategically and consistently is likely to be more important than the choice of approach itself, and the impact of any good strategy can be enhanced by getting this right.

Attending to the contextual factors – a case study on implementation and teacher development

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:32:38 GMT

Staff meetings are a part of all teachers’ weekly timetables – whether that be the full teaching team, departments or key stage phase meetings. I am not aware of many schools that do not allocate guided time to sitting down together. In my experience, due to packed timetables, staff meetings have always been a two-hour meeting at the end of a busy school day, by which point teachers are tired, over-stimulated and keen to get on with other classroom jobs.

Implementation for evidence informed approaches - Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning across the school

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:31:55 GMT

Three years ago, evidence-based practice was relatively unknown to us as a whole staff discussion point, let alone being seen as key to addressing school development, but knowing this was our next undertaking we went for it (strategically)!

The FAME approach and revisiting the Seven-Step Model

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:31:22 GMT

Having completed a substantial amount of CPD around metacognition over the last two years, we recently revisited the importance of modelling and shared writing from EYFS to the end of KS2 in our setting. Improving outcomes in writing continues to be a high priority element of our School Development Plan.

“I wish I had thought of that sooner” - The Integrated Model of Metacognition

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:30:50 GMT

“Evidence suggests the use of ‘metacognitive strategies’ – which get pupils to think about their own learning – can be worth the equivalent of an additional +7 months’ progress when used well. However, while the potential impact of these approaches is very high, particularly for disadvantaged pupils, less is known about how to apply them effectively in the classroom.”

EEF – Introduction to the Metacognition and Self-Regulation Guidance Report

Revisiting Cognitive Load Theory - Links to Embodied Cognition

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:30:20 GMT

As leaders and practitioners, we all appreciate the importance of continually reviewing developments in our field in order to ensure our practice remains relevant and maximises the learning outcomes of our pupils. Although Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has been known and developed within the academic realm for several decades, it has only come to prominence in instruction in the last few years.

Accessible professional development for the Early Years: update to the EEF Early Years Evidence Store

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:29:43 GMT

Those of us who work in or with Early Years settings will know the value of research which is both accessible and practically based. That is why I was so pleased to read today that the EEF is making good on its commitment to expanding the number of themes covered within its Early Years Evidence Store which was launched in late 2022 (don’t be confused by the use of the word store – the content is all freely available!). The original themes of PSED and Communication and Language (which continue to be expanded and updated) have now been joined by Early Literacy and Early Mathematics.

Research engaged and evidence informed - lessons from the flipped classroom

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:29:02 GMT

Having been involved with continuous professional learning and development for teachers and schools for a number of years, I am committed to the use of research to inform practice but am always also acutely aware of how this can become something that can be viewed as a ‘luxury’ or ‘add on’ in the busy day-to-day world of schools.

The power of disciplined professional enquiry

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:25:41 GMT

This year our primary trainee teachers were set a simple professional enquiry task. They were asked to think about how pupils learn, with a particular focus on cognitive load theory. The task was to be presented as a question; What impact does X have on the outcomes for pupil/pupils Y over a 6-week period?

Implementing the EEF’s ‘Five-a-day' principle to support SEND learners in the classroom

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:24:33 GMT

The EEF’s ‘Five-a-day' principle to support pupils with SEND, taken from their ‘Special Educational Needs in Mainstream School’s’ guidance report, is illustrated in the diagram below.

The Importance of Activating Prior Knowledge

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:22:53 GMT

I have previously written about the role of memory in classroom pedagogy. This post draws upon both this theme and its link to Metacognition in the discussion of the topic, Activating Prior Knowledge.

Learning through the arts – teacher development through Disciplined Inquiry

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:21:47 GMT

With the current – and often necessary – focus on enabling pupils whose schooling has been significantly disrupted by Covid to ‘catch up’, we could perhaps be forgiven for overlooking the impact that learning through the arts can have on children’s learning and wellbeing.

Teaching Assistants - The Key to Metacognition

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:20:21 GMT

Guest blog post: Abi Joachim, HLTA & ELE for Ipswich Associate Research Schools, shares the importance of metacognition in TA practice.

Why use 'low stakes testing' and not just 'testing'?

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:16:53 GMT

In my previous post, I mentioned how 'low stakes testing' (LST) could be used as a strategy for improving memory and recall in the classroom. Low stakes testing is "that students be given the opportunity to try (a task), make mistakes, and to learn from those mistakes with little or no penalty." (Oswego New York University 2022). Interpreted more simply, it is an informal testing scenario, which will not have an effect on summative assessments or grades and is likely to be used more regularly at the start, within or at the end of a lesson.

Every interaction is an intervention

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:15:35 GMT

Having been a leader of teacher development for many years there has never been a more crucial time for responsive, quality teaching. I’m sure all educationalists would agree that our main purpose is to enable children to flourish; and in these uncertain times we can perhaps more than ever be the difference our children deserve.

Practical recall methods in classroom practice

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:14:23 GMT

Following on from her blog post on recall in November 2021, ELE Vanessa Sullivan discusses the use of ‘Retrieval Grids’ and provides links to some useful templates and examples.

It’s all about the talk!

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:13:23 GMT

If you were a fly on the wall in an Early Years setting I have no doubt you would see children talking. Talking to friends. Talking to adults. Simply talking!

However, how often do you reflect on the quality of the talk? How many interactions are actual conversations rather than functional and instructional?

Using lesson studies to put teachers at the forefront of school improvement

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:12:14 GMT

How do we ensure that professional development leads to effective and sustained changes in teachers’ practice? To answer this question, we need to understand processes that lead to the most effective ‘teacher learning’. In this post, Sophie Denyer explains how the Lesson Study model impacted positively on practice and pupil outcomes in her school.

Effective CPD and toothpaste: what do they have in common?

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:10:24 GMT

Guest blogger Andy Samways, Director of Unity Research School, considers the recommendations outlined in the most recent EEF Guidance Report on Effective Professional Development.

Recall: how do we help our pupils remember?

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:09:19 GMT

At some point in every teacher’s career you will have no doubt asked yourself, “Why can’t my class remember this? I only taught it last term/this week/one hour ago!”. In this post, Vanessa Sullivan explores seminal research on recall and its links to fluency, spaced repetition and classroom practice.