Rob Coe: campaigning to get evidence taken seriously

In this episode, we talk to Professor Rob Coe. Rob was a maths teacher, then, for many years, Director of the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring. He is now both Director of Research and Development at Evidence Based Education (EBE) and Senior Associate at the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). Rob has been doing thoughtful, critical, uncompromising educational research for longer than I've been working in schools. When new thinking in English schools gained momentum, he was well placed to influence that thinking.His work - notably Improving Education: A triumph of hope over experience, the EEF's Teaching and Learning Toolkit, and EBE's Great Teaching Toolkit - has managed that rare balance of doing a wealth of hard research, particularly in the area of assessment and evaluation, while conveying it in clear and accessible ways that make sense to busy teachers who don't have graduate-level training in statistics. I wanted to hear from Rob about what he thought had improved - or at least changed - and why.We discussed:The reasons for grade inflation in the 1990s and 2000s, and the limits to educational improvementWhy Assessment for Learning made little difference in English schoolsWhat we can and can't learn from international testsWhy health so much better, and education hasn'tHow we can scale effective teacher developmentThe role of the Education Endowment Foundation and the successes it has hadRob's answer were characteristically thoughtful, original, and thought-provoking.