How the platform has been built?

SUMMA has established a long-term partnership with the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) to jointly develop the SUMMA Effective Education Practices Platform. This new regional platform successfully integrates the existing EEF Teaching and Learning toolkit, entailing more than 10,000 individual studies, with new and robust research carried out in Latin America and the Caribbean, which has been systematically collected, classified and synthesized by the SUMMA team. As a result, the SUMMA toolkit integrates more than 250 studies carried out in the region, to contextualize the global evidence. This new platform is available in Spanish, Portuguese and English in order to allow its use by communities throughout the region.

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) is an independent charity dedicated to breaking the link between family income and educational achievement, ensuring that children and young people from all backgrounds can make the most of their talents. In 2013, the EEF and the Sutton Trust joined the UK What Works Network, as the government-designated What Works Centre for Improving Education Outcomes for School-aged Children.

The partnership between EEF and SUMMA has been possible thanks to the financial support of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Fundación Chile (FCH). The resources provided by these institutions allowed the development and maintenance of the SUMMA Effective Education Practices Platform.

Based on our work-model to mobilise evidence, which entails the generation, synthesis and use of evidence, this platform seeks to achieve three major goals:

  • Provide high quality evidence that helps schools to make better-informed decisions and practices.
  • Offer a starting point for discussions in schools regarding strategies to improve student learning outcomes, and quality and equality of education. This implies that schools, teachers and educators should interpret evidence with nuance and professionalism making use of this with care and responsibility.
  • Open a space of collaboration among countries in the region to share, discuss and implement the best teaching and learning strategies. This is an ambitious challenge in the region as it requires a disposition to test, to fail, to learn and to share the best knowledge we have in our hands.