In response to the increasing emphasis on 'evidence-based teaching', this article examines the privileging of randomised controlled trials and their statistical synthesis (meta-analysis). It also pays particular attention to two third-level statistical syntheses: John Hattie's Visible learning project and the EEF's Teaching and learning toolkit. The article examines some of the technical shortcomings, philosophical implications and ideological effects of this approach to 'evidence', at all these three levels. At various points in the article, aspects of critical realism are referenced in order to highlight ontological and epistemological shortcomings of 'evidence-based teaching' and its implicit empiricism. Given the invocation of the medical field in this debate, it points to critiques within that field, including the need to pay attention to professional experience and clinical diagnosis in specific situations. Finally, it briefly locates the appeal to 'evidence' within a neoliberal policy framework.'gold standard' of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and their statistical synthesis -a more appropriate term than 'meta-analysis', since it generally offers little by way of analysis. When 'evidence' is reduced to a mean effect size, the individual person or event is shut out, complexity is lost and values are erased.This article aims to examine some of the technical shortcomings and ideological effects of demands for 'evidence-based teaching'. Firstly, given the argument that teachers should emulate evidence-based medicine (EBM), it is useful to recognise the contestation within that field. Secondly, the claim that evidence of this kind will make educational decision-making more 'scientific' is questioned. The article then focuses on the implications of methodological (and by implication epistemological and ontological) problems inherent in the privileging of randomised controlled trials and 'meta-analysis', as well as recent attempts at meta-meta-analysis such as Hattie's (2009) Visible learning project and the Education Endowment Fund's (EEF's) Teaching and learning toolkit (subsequently Toolkit for short). This critique then briefly situates the appeal to 'evidence' within the neoliberal policy framework.At key points, aspects of critical realism are discussed in order to highlight ontological and epistemological shortcomings of 'evidence-based' methods, and the simplification and reductionism of their approach to causation. Evidence-based medicineGiven the recurrent calls for teachers to emulate doctors' strong use of evidence, it is important to understand that all is not so straightforward in that field either. Greenhalgh et al. (2014) argue that real evidence-based medicine: 360 T. Wrigley et al.

School Effectiveness (SE), as a research paradigm and, more widely, as a set of political practices in school management and development, is examined in terms of the concept of 'reductionism'. The article serves to systematise an ongoing critique of Effectiveness by Ball, Morley, Fielding, Slee, etc. Building upon studies by the biologist Steven Rose and colleagues of reductionism from psychology to biology, the reductionism of the Effectiveness discourse is analysed in its methodological, contextual, historical and moral aspects. Finally, the article explores the impact of SE upon the dominant model of School Improvement in England in particular, and the need for transformation within that paradigm.

This paper seeks to challenge the view that there are no alternatives today to global neo-liberalism and its manifestation within schooling systems and educational practices, particularly as high stakes testing and reductive pedagogies and curricula. The paper challenges the fast and shallow learning endemic to these practices, arguing instead for a different temporality of learning and school change. Indeed, the paper argues that there is a pressing need for progressive educational change and that ideas are an important component for such change and for rethinking practices, although not enough in and of themselves. The paper works with a broad Enlightenment construction of pedagogies and a conception of school reform framed by values of democratic citizenship and social responsibility, and the need to connect with school communities, especially those communities disadvantaged by contemporary economic and policy settings. In disadvantaged communities, schools and teachers need to work with community funds of knowledge to scaffold to valorized high status school knowledge. The school also needs to function as a quasi democratic polis, while the reach of curriculum needs to be global. The focus of the paper is thinking about new pedagogies of teaching and school change as resources for hope.

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