EEF Project

Back in 2012, Chess in Schools and Communities started a shared project with The Education Endowment Fund (''EEF'') to assess the impact of our weekly chess curriculum sessions on academic attainment.

We worked with a significant number of Year 5 classes with the aim of assessing their results at the end of their time as Year 6s. A similar number of schools acted as control groups (without weekly chess sessions).

In the words of the EEF:

''The majority of studies that link chess to academic attainment have been carried out abroad and included self-selecting intervention groups. However a randomised controlled trial was carried out in Italy and this showed that chess had an impact on maths attainment. The study funded by the EEF will build on existing evidence with a more rigorous evaluation. If effective, chess is a cheap approach which could be taken up by many schools.''

If the study into the impact of chess on school attainment returns a positive result, it should lead to the opening of many doors. Would schools really decline the opportunity to add chess to their curriculum if it proved to be an effective way of increasing pupils' results?

Further details about this project can be found on The Education Endowment Fund website.