Educational Research and Policy-Making

Exploring the Border Country Between Research and Policy

Lesley Saunders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134127788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides a fascinating insight into the sometimes troubled relationship between 'research' and 'policy-making' in education. It shows how each of these areas of social and intellectual endeavour is in a state of dynamic change and how, as a result, they are becoming more mutually inter-permeable and posing increasingly challenging problems for each other. It suggests a number of scenarios for the future development of the relationship and throws down some challenges for both communities.

Drawing together contributions from the premier league of UK educationalists the book is both thought-provoking and anxiously awaited by other academics wanting to learn from the experience of senior researchers.

Chapter 1

Education(al) research and education policy-making

Is conflict inevitable?†

Geoff Whitty

Introduction

As British Educational Research Association (BERA) members well know, the relationship between research, policy and practice in education has been high on the agenda of the research and policy communities for a number of years now. In the UK it was highlighted in the mid-1990s, when a succession of commentators questioned the value and quality of much of the work of our community. It then became a particular issue for New Labour with its proclaimed commitment to evidence-informed policy and its emphasis on finding out and disseminating ‘what works’. But it is also an issue in other countries. For example, BERA has been active in fostering dialogue with education researchers in the USA, where the education research community is facing similar scrutiny in terms of the quality, relevance and impact of its work (See, for instance, the What Works Clearinghouse. See also Center for Education, 2004). Some of our Australian colleagues have been grappling with these same issues (see Yates, 2005).

Much of my own time in recent years has been spent in meetings discussing this issue – whether as Dean and then Director of the Institute of Education, as Vice-President and now President of BERA, as a member of the first Teaching and Learning Research Programme steering committee, as a member of the General Teaching Council for England and, most explicitly, as a member of the reconstituted National Educational Research Forum.¹ I have also addressed it more reflectively in my 2002 publication, Making Sense of Education Policy, and in papers I have given to the Higher Education Academy’s Education Subject Centre (ESCALATE) (Whitty, 2003) and to the Scottish Executive Education Department (Whitty, 2005).

While I shall draw on this work, in this paper I am going to focus specifically on relations between education researchers and government policy makers. I shall explore the extent to which that relationship is inherently one of conflict or at least a site of mutual misunderstanding and even suspicion, but also suggest some ways in which we ourselves might help to minimise the misunderstandings.

Ministerial views on the research–policy relationship

David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education and Employment from 1997 to 2001, looked at the research–policy relationship in detail in his 2000 Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) lecture entitled ‘Influence or irrelevance?’. In this he threw down the gauntlet to the social science community to contribute more directly and ‘productively’ to policy-making. But some academics read his lecture as a sinister demand that research should support government policy. After all, on taking office, he had told head teachers that the ‘cynics’ and ‘energy sappers’ should move aside rather than ‘erode the enthusiasm and hope that currently exists’ (Gardiner, 1997) – and it sometimes seemed that he felt that was all education researchers ever did.

Similarly, his successor, Charles Clarke, was wont to complain that education research never gave him anything useful, though his own characterisation of his perspective as a ‘saloon bar’ view suggests that even he recognised that his complaint was not itself securely evidence-informed. Nevertheless, throughout his period of office there were rumours that he wanted to do something drastic about the quality and relevance of education research.

The current Secretary of State, Ruth Kelly,² actually cites research in her speeches more often than her predecessors (e.g. Kelly, 2005a, 2005b). However, the potential tension between government and education researchers was recently highlighted again when the Times Educational Supplement ran a story about Peter Tymms’s work at Durham University under the title ‘Why this man scares Ruth Kelly’ (Mansell, 2005). It described what they called his ‘bitter row’ with government over his analysis of the National Curriculum Key Stage 2 performance data, which seemed to demonstrate that the government’s much proclaimed success in raising standards in primary schools was no such thing.

So now seems an opportune time to reflect again on the nature of the relationship between education researchers and government – and to consider the implications for BERA.

The abuse of education research

The election of New Labour was not, of course, the start of the affair. Throughout the 1990s there had been a whole series of reviews and criticisms of research in education. In 1991 and 1995 reviews were undertaken for the ESRC and a few years later another review was undertaken for Leverhulme, which considered the quality, funding and uses of research in education (see Rudduck & McIntyre, 1998). But the debate became dominated by a range of seemingly damning, albeit sometimes contradictory, criticisms made – for example, by David Hargreaves (1996) for the Teacher Training Agency (TTA), Tooley & Darby (1998) for the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED), and by Hillage et al. (1998) for the then Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) itself.

Although the overall picture was not entirely bleak, politicians reading the headlines and press reports could perhaps be forgiven for believing that UK education research as a whole was characterised by the following features:

• lack of rigour
• failure to produce cumulative research findings
• theoretical incoherence
• ideological bias
• irrelevance to schools
• lack of involvement of teachers
• inaccessibility and poor dissemination
• poor cost-effectiveness

Part of the problem is that subsequently all education research has tended to be tarred by the same brush and judged as wanting against the policy priorities of particular ministers. But this is neither fair nor a good evidence base for decisions about the future funding of education research. I will make just a few points about this now, but will return to the issue later.

First, with regard to quality, no one who regularly reviews papers and research proposals could deny that there is some poor-quality research in education, but then so there is in medicine and other fields with which education is often unfavourably compared. Yet education is one of the social sciences that the ESRC currently regards as meeting world-class quality criteria, notwithstanding its disappointing Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) grade profile in 2001 (Diamond, 2005a). Clearly, there is some excellent research going on in education departments and it is galling that this is so rarely acknowledged.

Second, with regard to relevance, not all research in education has the same focus or purpose. So the frequent charge from politicians of our irrelevance to schools and classrooms in terms of helping to raise achievement is surely both inaccurate, if one looks at the long history of classroom ethnography or action research (Hammersley, 1993), and anyway irrelevant to much of our work. While we may applaud the government’s focus on raising achievement and may even see it as the key agenda for most education departments in universities, it would make little sense to judge the birth cohort studies or our work in the history of education on their contribution to improving Standard Assessment Task results – at least directly.

Third, even research that is centrally concerned with improving practice and supporting teachers – in whatever phase of education – needs to be more diverse in its nature than the rhetoric of ‘what works’ sometimes seems to imply. Research defined too narrowly would actually be very limited as an evidence base for a teaching profession that is facing the huge challenges of a rapidly changing world, where what works today may not work tomorrow. Some research therefore needs to ask different sorts of questions, including why something works and, equally important, why it works in some contexts and not in others. And anyway, the professional literacy of teachers surely involves more than purely instrumental knowledge. It is therefore appropriate that a research-based profession should be informed by research that questions prevailing assumptions – and considers such questions as whether an activity is a worthwhile endeavour in the first place and what constitutes socially just schooling (Gale & Densmore, 2003).

So, while we must always take the criticisms of education research seriously, and be prepared to contribute to evidence-informed policy and practice, we must beware of inadvertently accepting the assumptions underlying them and allowing inappropriate assumptions, on the part of ministers and others, to define our field. And, while seeking to improve the quality of all UK research in education, we must resist attempts to impose inappropriate quality criteria. In my view, education research, and BERA as a professional association and learned society needs to be a broad church, and the assessment of quality must take into account fitness-for-purpose.

This means that, while some of our work will be aligned in various ways to the government’s agenda, some of it will necessarily be regarded by government as irrelevant or useless. Furthermore, some of it may well be seen as oppositional. Such a range of orientations to government policy is entirely appropriate for education research in a free society.

In practice, though, and perhaps even in principle, most members of BERA would probably agree with Paul Black & Dylan Wiliam (2003) that:

We do not believe that all educational research should be useful, for two reasons … [Firstly] there should be scope for some research in education to be absolutely uninterested in considerations of use. [Secondly] it is impossible to state, with any certainty, which research will be useful in the future. Having said this, we believe strongly that the majority of research in education should be undertaken with a view to improving educational provision

(p. 632).

To that extent, there may be less actual conflict between government priorities and researcher priorities than is sometimes suggested. This makes it important to look in more detail at how the relationship works out in practice. It is certainly not straightforward, either in general terms or in relation to the particular governments we have now, bearing in mind that we have different governments responsible for education in the different devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Even where the priorities of governments and researchers are broadly similar, there may well be conflicts in practice.

New Labour and education research

To explore this, I will look at the New Labour government’s treatment of education research in more detail. In this section, I shall be largely referring to the UK government, which is responsible for education in England.

The first thing to acknowledge is that, while the election of New Labour in May 1997 did not bring in a golden age for education, there were some important and positive contrasts with the previous Conservative administrations, not least for research in education. In rhetorical terms at least, the emphasis on evidenceinformed policy was a welcome change. And, as John Furlong (2005) has pointed out, it also brought resources. For example, in the party’s first three years in government, annual research expenditure in the English Education Department doubled from £5.4 million to over £10.4 million. Several major research programmes and centres have been established, such as the Centre for the Economics of Education and the Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning. The major budgets associated with key government programmes have also funded significant research operations, for example, the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC). The Department, and its equivalents in the devolved administrations, along with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and others, have also been involved in the ESRC-managed Teaching & Learning Research Programme, which is the largest programme of research in education in UK history. The programme is committed to the application of its findings to policy and practice and, more specifically, to conducting research with the potential to improve outcomes for learners.

As well as targeted programmes of research, there has been an attempt to bring greater coherence to education research – both in terms of synthesising research that is already available and coordinating future projects. From 2000, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) funded a five-year programme of systematic reviews of education research supported by the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre (EPPI) (see Oakley, 2002). The National Educational Research Forum (NERF) was set up in 1999 with the aim of better coordinating research efforts. The Schools Research Liaison Group, which pre-dates NERF, serves a similar purpose, being a mechanism by which the DfES and non-departmental public bodies share research agendas and devise strategies for addressing common problems such as priority setting.

But greater funding and public visibility have not been without their costs for education research. New Labour’s founding commitment to the ‘Third Way’ brought with it a mantra of ‘what works’, often interpreted in a rather narrow and mechanistic way. Under this commitment, and as the main funder of research and initiatives, the government has been increasingly explicit about the type of research that it sees as best fulfilling its aims. This was evident in David Blunkett’s aforementioned ESRC lecture and his call for a ‘revolution in the relations between government and the research community’ to support the government’s modernising agenda, which was coupled with an emphasis on research that demonstrates what types of policy initiatives are likely to be most effective (2000, p. 21).

The model against which research is most often judged in politicians’ minds seems to be what Sharon Gewirtz (2003) has characterised as the ‘hyperrationalist technicist’ approach. This is epitomised by David Hargreaves’s call for research that:

(i) demonstrates conclusively that if teachers change their practice from x to y there will be a significant and enduring improvement in teaching and learning and (ii) has developed an effective method of convincing teachers of the benefits of, and means to, changing from x to y

(1996, p. 5).

While I think David Hargreaves’s position is actually more sophisticated than Gewirtz suggests, something closer to her caricature was implicit in the draft of the first consultation paper produced by NERF (2000), which seemed to advocate a particularly limited and instrumental view of research. Indeed, this view of education research was seen as highly sinister by my colleague Stephen Ball, who claimed that it treated research as ‘about providing accounts of what works for unselfconscious classroom drones to implement’ and that it portended ‘an absolute standardization of research purposes, procedures, reporting and dissemination’ (Ball, 2001, pp. 266–267). Similar criticisms have been levelled at systematic reviewing (e.g. MacLure, 2005).

I am sure that most BERA members would resist such a view of education research, both in terms of its narrow focus and its engineering model of the way in which research relates to improvement. I imagine they would be particularly outraged if this became the only sort of research in education that was supported by public funds. However, it is surely difficult to claim that academics should have more rights than elected governments in determining priorities for public expenditure, so we need to argue the case for public support of a broader view of what research in education is about and the criteria against which it should be judged.

Although the NERF consultation exercise actually led to the acknowledgement of the need for a pluralist view of research, it also argued for a means of prioritising resources based on research making a ‘worthwhile contribution’ to education and ‘maximising impact’ (NERF, 2001). We need to establish what this might mean in our case and whether this is an appropriate test for all education research. ESRC, for example, values relevance to the development of a discipline as well as to policy and practice, as Ian Diamond made a point of stressing in his lecture at this year’s BERA conference (Diamond, 2005b).

Some of the criteria for public support of medieval history, to take Charles Clarke’s favourite scapegoat, are different from those for business studies, even if there is another set of criteria that applies to both. Much the same surely applies to the different components of education studies and we should not be cajoled into accepting that the only research in education that is worthwhile is research that has immediate pay-offs for policy and practice.

That said, and at the risk of seeming to narrow the field myself, I want to focus now on the sort of work that fits New Labour’s apparent preference for research on issues which are (to use David Blunkett’s words) ‘central and directly relevant to the policy debate’ (Blunkett, 2000, p. 2).

Understanding the use and misuse of education research

At this point, it should be noted that, in his ESRC lecture, David Blun...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Editor’s Introduction
• Chapter 1 Education(al) Research and Education Policy-Making
• Chapter 2 Schools Research in the English Ministry of Education
• Chapter 3 The interplay Between Policy and Research in Relation to ICT in Education in the UK
• Chapter 4 Exploring Literacy Policy-Making from the Inside Out
• Chapter 5 Negotiating Policy Space for Teachers’ Continuing Professional Development
• Chapter 6 Learning from the Work of the National Educational Research Forum
• Chapter 7 Go-betweens, Gofers or Mediators?
• Chapter 8 Enhancing Impact on Policy-Making Through Increasing User Engagement in Research
• Chapter 9 Protecting the Innocent
• Notes