EtonX self-study courses:
When the first UK lockdown came into effect in March 2020, EtonX and Eton College offered free access to all their self-study student courses to UK state schools. In the first lockdown (April-July 2020), 34,120 students enrolled on the courses. During the second lockdown (September-December 2020), another 10,213 students enrolled, and in the third lockdown (January 2021 – ongoing), we saw 6,537 students take up the courses. The range of courses offered was relevant to various skills schools wanted to develop in their students and we saw a wide spread of take-up of the different courses (Table 1). Image 1 shows the geographic location of the various schools which enrolled, a testament to fact that schools were spread all across the UK.
Read the reportEton and LAE Leadership Initiative
In the academic year 2019-2020, Eton College and the London Academy of Excellence (LAE) launched the Eton X LAE Leadership Institute (ELLI). In total we had 16 students who took part, 8 from each school, all in Year 12. The purpose of the institute was twofold: first, to strengthen the ties between the two schools; and second, to give students the opportunity to reflect on leadership and discuss what it takes to be a good leader.
Read the reportThe Resilience Project
From July 2019 through to July 2020, BrainCanDo worked with The Tony Little Centre for Innovation in Research in Learning (CIRL), Eton College to design, implement and evaluate a classroom-based character education intervention.
The purpose of this project was to develop a programme that could be readily adopted and implemented into existing PSHEE and wellbeing programmes in a range of different secondary school contexts for pupils in Key Stage 3 (Year 9). A total of 10 varied secondary schools from across the South East of England were recruited to trial the character education programme. The report presents the findings of the intervention.
Read the reportCharacter Education at Eton College
In 2018-19 the Tony Little Centre and Research Schools International carried out a research study on Character Education at Eton. This research study explored the following questions:
• Which character skills and dispositions are central to the Eton community?
• How is Eton supporting the development of these skills and dispositions?
• How can Eton further support the development of these skills and dispositions?
Character Development through Community Engagement
In 2018-2019 we conducted a study which looked at the impact of community engagement (ECCE) on the character development of C Block boys.
We adopted the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues framework and tried to identify whether students develop character virtues; namely empathy, openness to experience, teamwork, gratitude, and respect.
Read the reportHappiness at Eton College
In the 2016-17 academic year over 1,000 boys took part in a research project that CIRL conducted in collaboration with Research Schools International.
This project looked at the relationships among boys’ wellbeing and their academic achievement across the whole school. The research did not find any correlation between wellbeing and academic success, but the data from the wellbeing surveys (answered by over 1,000 boys, with a fuller follow-up survey answered by just over 100 randomly-selected boys) showed some interesting results.
Read the reportGrowth Mindset
During the 15-16 academic year, the Tony Little Centre worked with Research Schools International at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on cutting-edge research on growth mindset and prosocial attitudes.
Following previous research by Dweck and others, we used a brief course on mindset theory to help students become more growth-minded in their thinking. We also took a step into new research territory by exploring the relationship between growth mindset and prosocial attitudes.
Read the report