Research Assistant

An exciting opportunity to contribute to a mission that values teaching as a fundamental societal good.

Apply By: 29 November 2026

Location:

Within commuting distance of one of our campuses in Birmingham (B15 2HU
), Blackburn (BB1 2HT
), Bristol (BS10 5PY
), Doncaster (DN6 7EQ
), Beckenham (BR3 1QP
) or Redcar (TS10 4AB
) Salary: £35,570 per annum (plus London weighting if applicable) + benefits

The National Institute of Teaching (NIoT) is a school-led and research-informed organisation operating across England providing teacher and leadership training, from initial teacher education (ITE) to a dedicated course for CEOs of multi-academy trusts. The NIoT is among the largest national provider of ITE and trains thousands of teachers a year, across four regional teams and six campuses. We are committed to high quality, evidence-informed teacher education, and are on a mission to improve the quality of teacher and leader development across the system.

Part of this mission involves producing rigorous, impactful, and cutting-edge school-led research. We have a dedicated in-house research team who work with our programme-delivery teams to develop and test new methodologies, address critical challenges, and meet the evolving needs of our partner schools and organisations in the wider education sector. This is a new and exciting approach to embedding research within practice in education, and we work collaboratively to continually evolve and strengthen our approach to making research useful in teacher education practice.

This role sits within the Research team, working on the Analysis of Teaching Practice (ATP) project, part of Teaching Improvement through Data and Evaluation (TIDE) project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation.

What if we could better understand what happens in the classroom, and use that insight to help teachers develop their practice and improve outcomes for pupils?

We’re looking for a Research Assistant to join our exciting Analysis of Teaching Practice (ATP) project, an ambitious programme bringing together education research, classroom expertise and AI to deepen our understanding of effective teaching.

The project is developing a secure tool that enables early career teachers (ECTs) and their mentors to record and review lessons, alongside an AI model designed to identify teaching practices within lesson transcripts. Together, these tools have the potential to provide mentors with structured insights into classroom practice and help us explore which teaching practices are associated with teachers’ impact on pupil attainment.

This role plays is central to making this work possible.

Working closely with colleagues across our research team, you’ll help build the high-quality, expert-labelled dataset that will underpin the AI model. You will coordinate and quality-assure the labelling of lesson transcripts by experienced teacher educators, analyse agreement between labellers, prepare and analyse data, and work directly with the schools, teachers and mentors using the recording tool.

This is a fantastic opportunity for someone who enjoys combining careful research and analysis with practical coordination and collaboration. You’ll need to be highly organised, comfortable working with complex data and committed to maintaining accuracy and quality.

Most importantly, you’ll be excited by the opportunity to conduct research that doesn’t simply sit on a page, but has the potential to support teachers, strengthen teacher development and contribute to better outcomes for pupils.

This is a hybrid role, with an expectation that you’ll work from one of our campuses at least once a fortnight, as well as attending in person where there is a business need.

We also bring colleagues from…