To improve the quality and equity of the education system in Wales, there has been a renewed focus on creating a more evidence-informed practice. Within a self-improving system, teachers and school leaders are now largely responsible for improving the quality of provision by identifying and developing best practice through teacher enquiry and the use of external research evidence. However, the ways in which evidence-into-use is to be achieved is yet to be explicitly defined. The empirical research presented in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 were conducted with the staff and pupils from a well-established cluster of schools in Wales. The
cluster had entered a collaborative research partnership with GwE (regional consortia) and CIEREI, Bangor University, to commission close-to-practice research that aligns with the values and priorities of the organisations involved. The primary aim for the partnership was to increase the use of evidence-based methods in the cluster and move them towards a more
evidence-informed practice. A priority outlined by the senior leaders in the schools was to improve their understanding of the evidence base for the interventions already in use (Chapter 3). The main research aims set out by GwE, and Bangor University were to: explore ways to increase the use of evidence-based methods in schools (which included understanding what facilitates senior leaders adoption-decisions – Chapter 4); exploring the effectiveness of educator-friendly reviews of evidence on existing provision (Chapter 3); evaluating the extent that teachers implement evidence-based programmes following typical in-service training (Chapter 5); and, finally, to describe the process of contextually adapting an evidence-based programme to enhance compatibility, and to evaluate if this leads to increased adoption and high levels of implementation (Chapter 6). Our results suggest that schools adopt a large number of interventions, which impact school budgets, teachers’ time and capacity to adopt and use other evidence-based methods, and the extent that provision is implemented. We discovered that research evidence is infrequently used to inform school provision, and that many programmes and teaching methods lack a robust evidence-base. When choosing provision, we found that school leaders more often seek information from other educators and the local school improvement advisor, and, are more likely to adopt provision of it is perceived as compatibility with context. When exploring ways to increase the use of evidence-based methods, we found that educator-friendly summaries of evidence have little impact on the provision that schools use, and typical in service training is not effective. However, the adaption of an evidence-based programme to make it more contextually compatible, does lead to adoption, high levels of implementation and intentions to sustain use. The evidence derived from the empirical chapters has provided important new information about the range of interventions in use in a cluster of school in Wales; contributed to the literature on determining how best to enhance the use of evidence-based methods in schools; and improved the quality of knowledge and decision-making by senior leaders, moving the cluster towards more evidence-informed practice. The limitations of the research and implications for the cluster, policy and research are discussed in the concluding chapter of this thesis.