The Evidence Maturity Check
Twelve questions on whether your institution can tell whether anything it does actually works.
A 12-statement self-assessment across 4 sections, scored out of 24. Around 6 minutes with a senior team. Score each statement No, In part or Yes, read the band, and use the lowest section as the place to start.
How to use this
Most schools evaluate privately, late, and without a baseline, which means each one re-learns at the expense of its own cohort what a neighbouring school already knows. This instrument tests four capabilities: baselines, cost, honesty and sharing.
Score each statement No (0), In part (1) or Yes (2). Answer for the institution as it behaves this term, not as it is described in policy. Where two people disagree, the lower score is the more useful one.
| No | In part | Yes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1We record a baseline before an intervention starts, rather than reconstructing one afterwards. | |||
| 2We state in advance what result would make us stop, and we have stopped something. | |||
| 3We can identify a comparison group, even an imperfect one, for our main interventions. | |||
| 4We record staff time as a cost of every intervention, not only cash spend. | |||
| 5We know the cost per pupil of our three largest interventions. | |||
| 6Cost sits alongside effect in the papers governors actually read. | |||
| 7Null and negative results are reported internally without professional consequence. | |||
| 8We distinguish between what we measured and what we believe. | |||
| 9Someone outside the team that ran the intervention reviews the evaluation. | |||
| 10We publish what we learn in a form a neighbouring school could act on. | |||
| 11We look for existing evidence before commissioning our own. | |||
| 12We have changed a decision in the last year because of evidence we did not like. |
Scoring by section
- Baselines and design
- Statements 1, 2, 3. Out of 6. Your weakest capability is design. Without a baseline and a stopping rule agreed in advance, the evaluation can only confirm the decision already taken. Fix the baseline before the next adoption; it costs an afternoon.
- Cost
- Statements 4, 5, 6. Out of 6. Your weakest capability is cost. Effect without cost is not a finding a governor can act on, because it cannot be compared to anything. Start with staff hours, which is where the real spend usually hides.
- Honesty
- Statements 7, 8, 9. Out of 6. Your weakest capability is honesty. If a null result carries a professional cost, the institution will only ever hear about successes, and will act on a distorted record. Publish one null result internally and protect the person who reports it.
- Sharing
- Statements 10, 11, 12. Out of 6. Your weakest capability is sharing. Private evaluation makes every school pay full price for the same lesson. Write up one intervention in a page a neighbouring school could use, including what it cost.
Reading the total
- 20–24 · Evidence-holding
- You can tell whether your own decisions worked, which is rarer than the sector admits. The remaining value is external: what you know is currently only useful to you.
- 13–19 · Partial
- You can answer some questions about impact and not others, and the gap tends to sit where the spend is largest. Close the weakest capability rather than refining the strongest.
- 7–12 · Retrospective
- Evaluation happens after the decision, which makes it justification rather than evidence. The single highest-return change is a baseline taken before the next adoption.
- 0–6 · Unable to say
- On this assessment the institution cannot currently tell whether what it does works. That is the predictable result of a system that asks for compliance rather than evidence, and it is fixable within one term. Take a baseline before the next adoption.
Take this evaluation online to see your score against the anonymised sector benchmark at educave.ai. educave.ai · Free to copy, forward and use inside your institution, with attribution.