Sonia Ilie: "Schools and teachers engaging with evidence to address educational inequality: .......

Departmental Seminar: 6/3/24

"Schools and teachers engaging with evidence to address educational inequality: Insights from a ‘place-based’ programme"

Sonia Ilie, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

This talk explores schools’ and teachers’ experiences of a ‘place-based’ programme aiming to improve learning outcomes by increasing their engagement with evidence. While schools were interested, they often needed the evidence re-cast for their own local contexts. School-to-school work was important, as was leadership support and an ethos of teacher collaboration, but this required substantial relational expertise and an emphasis on professional learning. Practice changes were possible, especially where risk taking was seen as positive and evidence contextualisation was present.

Bio
Sonia Ilie is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education University of Cambridge, where she researches education inequalities, the impact of deprivation and other socio-economic circumstances on access and outcomes in (higher) education, and evaluates interventions to build evidence of how we might address these inequalities.