Abstract

Seeing the impact of an educational policy or intervention is notoriously difficult. Imperatives to account for the wise use of public money, understandably lead politicians and policy makers to prioritise the identification and measurement of ‘hard’ outcomes in the form of benchmarks, targets and league tables. Contributions from the disciplines of education and sociology are used in this paper to show how these ways of seeing impact can result in shallow public demonstrations of compliance with centrally prescribed standards and curricula. The same contributions reveal how such approaches can have other perverse consequences in that they can serve to divert the attention of teachers away from educational values and pedagogical concerns, towards ‘teaching to the test’ or the pursuit other ‘fabrications’ of achievement. From the discipline of philosophy we turn to the work of John Dewey to consider ‘softer’ approaches to educational evaluation that might otherwise be undervalued or overlooked. These different ways of seeing impact, we argue, offer possibilities for the development of evaluative practices in education which may, in the longer term prove to be as, if not more, effective than their ‘harder’ counterparts. This interdisciplinary discussion is then connected to the work of the Centre for Excellence in Teacher Training operating at the University of Sunderland (SUNCETT). The Centre is part of a nationally funded educational policy initiative in England. The overall aim of the Centre is to improve teaching and learning in the initial and continuing professional development of teachers. As part of this policy initiative, we are exploring how ‘hard’ and ‘softer’ approaches to educational evaluation may be used to recognise the impact of our work.