5:1 Isn't Proven: The Small-Scale Study Behind The Ratio

Five specific bits of praise for every one criticism. It comes from a real classroom study — small-scale, and the EEF calls it "promising" rather than proven — and this episode translates it for home, across four very different evenings: Early Years, Primary, Secondary, and SEN as a full setting rather than a footnote. The first episode of Parents Commute, our strand written for parents and carers rather than staff.

Sources

• EEF guidance report — Improving Behaviour in Schools (7 June 2019), Box 6: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/behaviour
• - EEF Teaching & Learning Toolkit — Behaviour interventions strand (brief context only): https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/behaviour-interventions
• - Printable one-pagers for every episode, free: https://theeducationcommute.co.uk

What's covered

• The Number: 5:1 — five specific praise statements for every one criticism, with its small-scale caveat attached every time it's said
• - Early Years: catch it on the spot, name exactly what they did, and don't let the correction repeat more often than the praise
• - Primary: why "you waited your turn without me asking" does work that "well done" doesn't
• - Secondary: shifting from "well done" to "I noticed" — observation lands where evaluation grates
• - SEN: why we refuse to invent a SEND-adjusted ratio, and why consistency matters more than the number
• - The positive-greeting finding, and what it looks like at your own front door at half three

Actions for consideration

• Tonight, before the first correction leaves your mouth, find one genuinely specific thing to praise. Just one.
• - Make the first thing they hear coming through the door a real greeting, not the first correction of the evening.
• - If you can't name what you were praising, it isn't doing the job the study describes.
• - Give it a week before deciding whether it's working. Small-scale and promising is not the same as instant.

Disclosure

Both voices on this show are synthesised (NotebookLM, Google); the research, reading and editorial judgement are done by a serving practitioner. Said aloud in the episode, and repeated here.

Strand: Parents