Abstract: This research paper reports on evidence from 24 teacher-led action research case studies and builds on the 2008 CfBT Education Trust
published paper by Richard Churches and John West-Burnham ‘Leading learning through relationships: the implications of Neurolinguistic programming for personalisation and the children’s agenda in England’.

The current research focused on two gaps in
the research literature:

• The absence of any formal and systematic literature review of evidence in relation to the impact and use of NLP in education
• The lack of any substantive teacher-led and classroom-based action research in this area.

Teachers followed the Teacher Learning Academy framework in designing and implementing their research – a framework that CfBT Education Trust was closely involved in the development of. All of the case studies demonstrate significant impact in relation to teacher development, with many demonstrating positive impacts on pupil learning outcomes. The paper also contains the first systematic and comprehensive literature review of research evidence into the impact of NLP in education and discusses the content of 111 papers and references including quantitative and qualitative research evidence. The majority of published work was found to be supportive of the use of NLP in schools and education although, as the authors point out, this should only be considered as an interim finding because of the wide range of methods used and variations in the quality of some of the research.