Helen Amass

There is a common misconception, says Timothy Shanahan, that it doesn’t matter what children and young people read, “as long as they’re reading”. The distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago explains that the rationale for this is that “if kids are practising, it’ll make them better readers”. This is something Shanahan believed himself in the past. Yet over the course of his career, he has changed his mind about how much it matters what children are reading.

“One of our concerns is that we hope schools don’t change things overnight as a result of this,” says Jeremy Hodgen, professor of mathematics education at University College London (UCL) and at the Observatory for Mathematical Education at the University of Nottingham. Hodgen was one of the lead authors of a recent study commissioned by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) that investigated the impact of different grouping practices in key stage 3 maths teaching.

“I feel more and more under pressure to really think about this problem,” says Dame Uta Frith, referring to the exponential rise in the number of young people being diagnosed with autism.