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Dixons Academies Trust

The EEF have released a report on our collaboration with Ambition Institute

Posted 16th September 2024

Our revolutionary nine-day fortnight was recently launched across our trust and last week, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) released a report on our collaboration with Ambition Institute, on evaluating our flexible working initiative, which will explore whether it improves our recruitment and retention.  

Moving to a nine-day working fortnight involves changing teachers’ contractual working hours to give them one extra day off per fortnight. 

We are delighted to be working with Ambition Institute to analyse the impact of our nine-day fortnight initiative across all academies in our trust. It’s important to us to have a clear and tangible evaluation, and results for our nine-day fortnight initiative, as our overall aims were to improve teacher wellbeing, whilst still providing the best outcomes for our young people. 

There is a widespread perception among teachers and school leaders that increasing the availability of flexible working (arrangements which allow employees to vary the amount, timing, or location of their work) could improve teacher retention. However, there is currently an absence of evidence that increasing flexibility improves teacher recruitment or retention. This project will help to fill this gap in the evidence base by researching the move to a nine-day working fortnight for teachers. Taken from the EEF report on our collaboration. 

Teachers and leaders throughout sample academies across our trust will be taking part in interviews to share their aspirations for the time and space the new working model will provide. This piece of research will hopefully showcase the impact Dixons has on the wellbeing of our teachers to pave the way for positive change in the education sector.  

“The study is a ​‘School Choices’ project. School leaders make choices about school-wide practices and approaches that are intended to produce positive outcomes for pupils, such as how to organise the school day or communicate with families.  

The aim of School Choices research is to produce causal evidence about the impact of different school-level approaches and policies on outcomes of interest, with particular attention to impact on pupils from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.” Taken from the EEF report on our collaboration. 

The project is currently in the initial scoping phase which will explore in which schools it is feasible to implement a nine-day working fortnight, identify costs involved for schools to move to a nine-day fortnight, explore challenges and lessons learned by schools that have adopted a nine-day fortnight, and identify if the necessary data is available to causally assess the impact. 

Read the full EEF report here.