What makes great pedagogy? Nine claims from research

By Chris Husbands and Jo Pearce for National College for School Leadership

There is a strong consensus that high performance in education systems is dependent on the quality of teaching. Barber put it simply: ‘the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers’ (Barber & Mourshed, 2007:13) and his report for McKinsey concluded that ‘the best school systems are those that have the best teachers’ (ibid:7). Recent UK research concluded that ‘having a very effective, rather than an average teacher raises each pupil’s attainment by a third of [an examination] grade’ (Machin & Murphy, 2011:5). In a review of the research on teacher quality,