Innovation Impulse for Education: Baseline Survey

This report sets out the results of the first round of periodic surveys into outcome measures from five experiments involving innovations in the organization of education (IIO, Innovation Impulse for Education). The IIO is a subsidy scheme that enables primary and secondary schools to experiment with innovative ways of working and of organizing their curriculum, with the objective of reducing the demand for teachers. The aim of the experiments is to do the same amount of work with fewer teachers without undermining educational quality or increasing workloads. Four of the five experiments are taking place in secondary schools. The biggest experiment in terms of the number of schools taking part is in primary education.

The survey of the five IIO experiments comprises a process evaluation and an effect evaluation. For the effect evaluation, the group of experimental schools is compared with a group of comparable control schools not implementing the innovation concerned. The long-term effects are assessed by comparing the outcome measures for the two groups of schools. This baseline survey did not find any difference between the experimental and the control groups as regards the most important outcome measure, teacher productivity. It thus provides a good basis for follow-up measurements of the effect of the five innovation concepts on teacher productivity.