School recruitment was one of the biggest challenges of this trial. This led to some compromises in the research design. The adjustments made to the research design also show the dynamic relationship between the research design and recruitment and demonstrate the reasons why a simple two-group controlled trial was conducted.
5.2.1. Intervention group
There were three phases in the recruitment process of the intervention group presented in Table 5.1.
Table 5.1. Intervention Group Recruitment
1st phase Number of schools receiving
P4C training in 2015
48
Number of schools contacted 47
Number of schools excluded 1
Number of schools
consented
9
2nd phase Contact schools which
received training before 2015
31
Number of schools contacted 31
Number of schools excluded 0
Number of schools
consented
2
3rd phase Number of teachers
approached via training events
More than 10
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Number of schools
consented
1
In the first phase, schools which recently received P4C training by SAPERE were contacted. One school was not contacted to participate in the research because it was a special education school. This research does not exclude all students with special education needs. SEN students who attended a mainstream school were still included in the study. However, it was accepted that different assessments should have been sent in a special education school and there was no time to construct these. I considered it unethical to send the same measurement tools to these students without any adjustment to their needs.
Due to the low number of headteachers who consented during the first phase, the schools which received training before 2015 were also contacted. Even though not included in the initial design of the study, schools with different starting points of implementing P4C enabled the creation of regressions for the relationship between time being involved in P4C sessions and critical thinking and creativity performance.
Finally, in the third phase teachers were contacted during the SAPERE training events. As a researcher I had to attend the SAPERE training, so I will be informed about the specific implementation of P4C and the guidelines suggested by SAPERE. The attendance of the training events though was also considered an opportunity to recruit schools. Concerning the third phase of recruitment, Table 5.1. reports the number of teachers instead of the number of schools because it is common for two or more teachers from the same school to attend the training.
The third phase was not as successful as expected. The teachers who attended the events were rarely Year 5 teachers. Only two of the teachers I met on training days were Year 5 teachers. There were also three teachers willing to pass my contact details to the Year 5 teachers of their schools. As a result, the recruitment of schools via the SAPERE training events was not very successful. The schools which were recruited in the intervention group were 12 in total.
5.2.2. Comparison group
Initially, there was an attempt for recruitment of a matching comparison group. Matching schools were sought in order to be contacted and recruited as a comparison group.
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I decided to try to recruit a comparison group matched on shared characteristics, such as proportion of children receiving Free School Meals, proportion of Special Education Needs students and students with English as additional Language and Ofsted reports, accessed via existing datasets. The Department for Education league tables would allow a comparison between the schools based on the performance levels achieved. However, the performance levels do not seem as precise, as the fine scores. Therefore, I decided that the Families of Schools Database provided by Education Endowment Foundation (https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk /resources/families-of-schools-database ) includes more detailed comparisons. According to this database, the primary schools in England are matched with similar schools based on various criteria and as the website is interactive the criteria can be chosen by the user. When a school and a criterion are chosen, then another school is suggested as the perfect match and a group of schools are recommended as belonging in the same family schools. For each of the intervention schools which consent to participate in the intervention group, the Families of Schools Database suggested more than one schools. These were matched based on the geographic proximity, performance of students (fine score) and attainment gap between premium and non- premium pupils.
It should be highlighted that in fact equal number of schools (more than 80) were approached for the participation in the comparison group (see Table 5.2.). The recruitment of the comparison group was more difficult than I expected and a less robust recruitment process was used. The initial effort to take into consideration only matching criteria was abandoned due to the low consent rate. At the last stage, any school in England not implementing P4C could participate as a comparison group. I tried to look for volunteer schools and at the schools which did not implement P4C and co-operated with the PGCE programme at my own institution were contacted.
Some of the schools which were considered as appropriate for matching in the already recruited intervention group found to implement P4C. These schools showed interest in the research, but they had to be categorised in the intervention group. Consequently, during the attempt to recruit the schools for the comparison group, 6 schools were recruited for the comparison group and 3 additional schools for the intervention group.
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Table 5.2. Comparison group Recruitment
Phase Type of
Approach
Number of schools contacted
Number of Schools consented
1st phase Number of
matched schools contacted based on the DfE tables and Families of Schools Database
76 6 schools (3 schools were recruited for the comparison group. The other 3 schools were contacted to be in the comparison group, but they were found to implement P4C and trained by SAPERE. As a result they were included in the intervention group)
2nd phase Number of schools approached via School of Education at Durham University and volunteering 9 3
Even though the recruitment of matching schools would have provided a robust research design, this recruitment process was not successful. Each of the school to be contacted with two different methods (e-mails and phone calls) and at least two times (for phone guide used for approach of the schools, see Appendix 1a). The school offices were initially conducted via e-mail. I also informed them about a phone call in the following days. The school office usually acted as a gatekeeper explaining that the school was too busy to participate in a research and rarely passing the calls to the school teachers or headteachers and the e-mails for expression of interest were rarely replied to.
It is likely that this recruitment obstacle is associated with the lack of extrinsic motivation and research funding. If they were resources or training offered to the control schools with a waiting list design, the rate of consent might have been higher. In other words, there was no incentive for control schools except for school reports to be sent at the end of the study.
The intervention group schools having already taken or agreed to take SAPERE training had a motivation to investigate the effectiveness of P4C programme in their
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students. However, the schools in the comparison group were probably less interested in the P4C effectiveness. If there was funding, a crossover research design would have adopted. According to this design, the comparison group gets the intervention and a second post-test follows (Shadish, Cook & Campbell, 2002, p.268). However, due to the lack of funding, the schools in the comparison group were not given any reward for their participation. Consequently, the difficulty in recruitment of comparison group led to compromises in the research design.