topic?Educational research has been criticised as irrelevant, lacking rigour and inaccessible (Whitty, 2007). Discuss critically such evaluations of education(al) research and subsequent efforts to increase its relevance and quality.
British Educational Research Journal
d
ISSN: 0141-1926 (Print) 1469-3518 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cber20
Education(al) research and education policy
making: is conflict inevitable?
Geoff Whitty
To cite this article: Geoff Whitty (2006) Education(al) research and education policy
making: is conflict inevitable?, British Educational Research Journal, 32:2, 159-176, DOI:
10.1080/01411920600568919
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British Educational Research Journal
Vol. 32, No. 2, April 2006, pp. 159–176
Education(al) research and education
policy making: is conflict inevitable?{
Geoff Whitty*
Institute of Education, University of London, UK
The relationship between research and policy and practice in education is a long-standing issue in
many countries. Focusing on the UK Government, which is responsible for education in England,
this paper looks at the criticisms of education research that have been made in recent years by
government and related non-departmental public bodies and stakeholders. It then looks in more
detail at specific examples of the use that has—and has not—been made of research in developing
policy. But rather than produce a balance sheet of pluses and minuses in policy makers’ use of
evidence, the paper emphasises the realities of the policy making process and the difficulties in
establishing consistently and exclusively evidence-based policy. At the same time, it argues that
researchers should beware of allowing their work to be shaped entirely by the Government’s call
for research that is directly useful to policy by always prioritising applied or practice-based
approaches. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for BERA to promote all types of
education research—regardless of its utility for policy makers—and, as part of this, for the
education research community to ensure that appropriate quality criteria are available for all
approaches.
Introduction
As 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 mid1990s, 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 (e.g. What Works
Clearinghouse1; Center for Education, 2004). Some of our Australian colleagues
have been grappling with these same issues (see Yates, 2005).
{
Inaugural Presidential address, BERA, University of Glamorgan, September 2005.
*Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 0141-1926 (print)/ISSN 1469-3518 (online)/06/020159-18
# 2006 British Educational Research Association
DOI: 10.1080/01411920600568919
160 G. Whitty
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 VicePresident and now President of BERA, as a member of the first Teaching and
Learning Research Programme2 steering committee, as a member of the General
Teaching Council for England3 and, most explicitly, as a member of the
reconstituted National Educational Research Forum.4 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)5 (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,6 actually cites research in her
speeches more often than her predecessors (e.g. Kelly, 2005a, b). 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.
Education(al) research and education policy making 161
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:
N
N
N
N
N
N
N
N
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.
Firstly, 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)7 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.
Secondly, 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
162 G. Whitty
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.
Thirdly, 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 and 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
Education(al) research and education policy making 163
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
Education8 and the Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning.9 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).10 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 nondepartmental 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’
164 G. Whitty
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 ‘hyper-rationalisttechnicist’ 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
Education(al) research and education policy making 165
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, is should be noted that, in his ESRC lecture, David Blunkett did at
least recognise that relevance to the Government’s agenda did not imply
unconditional support for government policy and that there had been misunderstandings on both sides:
sometimes, when [research] does try to be directly relevant to the main policy and
political debates, [it seems to be] driven by ideology paraded as intellectual inquiry or
critique, setting out with the sole aim of collecting evidence that will prove policy wrong
rather than genuinely seeking to evaluate or interpret impact. A number of studies have
tried to claim evidence of poor outcomes when policies have barely been implemented. I
acknowledge that previous criticisms I have made of particular studies have been
interpreted by some as denial of evidence which conflicts with policy but we must move
forward now—government in its capacity to give serious consideration to ‘difficult’
findings and researchers in their capacity to remain open minded [about our policies].
(Blunkett, 2000, p. 2)
But how realistic is this in practice? Even if it were of the highest international quality
and clearly demonstrated what works, would governments consistently seek out the
best research and make good use of it? Would they submit research to rigorous
evaluation before using it to inform or justify policy? And if they did, how would this fit
with the timescale of policy making and implementation? I will start with the negative
cases, where research has been ignored or where it has been used selectively.
One well-known example is the use that was made in England of evidence on class
size during the 1997 general election. Evidence on the effects of class size is
notoriously contentious and difficult to interpret, and the controversies continue to
this day (see Blatchford et al., 2004). Even so, New Labour’s commitment in the
1997 election to cut class sizes at Key Stage 1 traded quite consciously on research
findings accepted by most researchers and most teachers—evidence that, if smaller
classes have an unambiguously positive impact anywhere, it is most marked in the
very early years of schooling and in the most socially disadvantaged areas. So, the
manifesto commitment to cut class sizes at Key Stage 1 to below 30 using monies
that had formerly been used to send able children to private schools11 looked like a
socially progressive policy based on robust research findings. Yet, as a policy it was
probably driven as much by the findings of election opinion polling as those of
education research, given that most classes over 30 were in marginal suburban
constituencies, not in inner-city areas where classes were already below that level.
166 G. Whitty
Some even more robust findings on the beneficial effects of cutting infant class size
to 15 in disadvantaged areas did not influence the policy at all, presumably because
it would have been extremely expensive, but possibly also because additional votes in
these inner-city constituencies would not swing the election (Whitty, 2002).
One could argue that as far as New Labour was concerned, 1997 had to be all
about getting into power, and only then could things be different thereafter. Yet,
even in power, New Labour has sometimes used research quite selectively and has
not appeared particularly concerned about the quality of research as long as it serves
its policy purposes. One notorious example of this that I have cited before is the way
in which research was used in the English White Paper of 2001, Schools: achieving
success (DfES, 2001). One paragraph stated bluntly: ‘There are those who have said
that specialist schools will create a two-tier system. They won’t’ (p. 40). In making
its case on specialist schools the White Paper unashamedly used research carried out
for the Specialist Schools Trust, which at the time had not been submitted to peer
review and was regarded as flawed by key researchers in the field (e.g. Goldstein,
2001). This particular example is even more striking given that, at the very same
time, the Department of Health was publicly rejecting some potentially damaging
research on the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism on the grounds that
it could not be taken seriously because it had not been subjected to scientific peer
review. In neither case am I making any judgement about the actual quality of the
research, merely noting the different terms on which government was prepared to
use it, motivated presumably by considerations other than the robustness of the
research.
A current example of problematic use of research evidence is provided by
the Academies programme. Although we do not yet have the data against which
to assess Tony Blair’s claim that Academies are working (e.g. Smithers et al., 2005),
the use of evidence to date has been less than convincing. Quite apart from the way in
which the Government has spun the critical PricewaterhouseCoopers report (DfES,
2005) and the critical report by Ofsted on Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough
(e.g. see Ford, 2005), Stephen Gorard (2005) has demonstrated that there are
serious questions about the way in which the Government has used performance
data to justify continuing with the policy. His own analysis of early results indicated
that claims that these schools were, in general, performing better for equivalent
students than the schools they had replaced could not be sustained on the basis of the
evidence then available. In a carefully worded conclusion, he says:
any improvement may take time and will be very challenging, and it would be hasty to
condemn the programme as a whole on the [limited data available so far]. On the other
hand, it is quite clear that it would be equally hasty and far less warranted to credit the
programme with success at this stage. Yet this is what the government and the
Academies are doing. To point this out is not to make a criticism of the individuals
involved or their practice, but of the way in which policy is being made on the basis of
little useful evidence, and is seldom allowed to be seen to fail for electoral reasons. To
expand the [Academies] programme on the basis of what has happened so far is so
removed from the evidence-based policy making that is a mantra of government today
that it is scarcely worth pointing out. (p. 376)
Education(al) research and education policy making 167
This parallels concerns expressed by the House of Commons Education and Skills
Select Committee (2005), which used both the specialist school and Academies
programmes to argue that:
Despite the government’s proclaimed attachment to evidence-based policy, expensive
schemes seem to be rolled out before being adequately tested and evaluated compared
to other less expensive alternatives. (p. 17)
Gorard argues that a more equitable policy than the Academies programme would
be one targeted at individuals for as long as they remain disadvantaged and in
whichever area or institution they move to. My final example of the complex
relations between research and policy also relates to this issue and is one that touches
me personally in a number of ways.
In July 2005 an article in the Times Educational Supplement commented on the
relative influence on policy of consultancy companies, think tanks and the higher
education research community (Slater, 2005). It began as follows:
If you want to influence Labour’s education policy, you could do worse than target a
think tank and a management consultancy. More than London University’s Institute of
Education, the teaching unions or even the Labour Party, the Institute for Public Policy
Research and McKinsey have the ear of people in high places. (p. 15)
My initial defensive reaction, as Director of the Institute, was that this claim was
somewhat misleading, not least because the influential new recruit to McKinsey’s
that the article cited, Michael Barber, was formerly a professor at the Institute.
Furthermore, two of the only four university-based educationists mentioned as
having any ongoing influence at the DfES, David Hopkins and Tim Brighouse, are
actually based at the Institute. However, the following week, I came to realise that
the article’s central claim about our lack of influence was unfortunately true.
Ruth Kelly made a keynote speech—as it happens, at the Institute for Public
Policy Research (IPPR)—in which she acknowledged that the gap between poorer
and richer children’s results in primary schools had not been reduced by New
Labour policies. The DfES’s own research had apparently shown that, while all
pupils did better in 2004 than in 1998, those pupils from higher income families
made more progress than those on free school meals, even though schools in
deprived areas improved more than those in wealthier neighbourhoods. She also
advocated more use of individual interventions, singling out Reading Recovery12 for
special mention and support (Kelly, 2005b).
I was not surprised either at this finding or the proposed remedy. But I was
puzzled that New Labour should have been surprised. After all, nearly eight years
previously, just as New Labour was coming to power, along with Peter Mortimore, I
published a paper entitled ‘Can school improvement overcome the effects of
disadvantage?’ (Mortimore & Whitty, 1997), which predicted this very outcome. In
it, we warned that a careful reading of the school effectiveness research (of which
Peter was one of the leading UK exponents) indicated that, if all schools were
brought up to the level of the best, the social class gap in performance would be even
starker than it was then—unless, that is, positive action were to be taken to provide
extra support for disadvantaged pupils, including, incidentally, Reading Recovery.
168 G. Whitty
So I couldn’t help but ask, isn’t there a lesson for New Labour in all this? If they
had listened more openly to the academic research community back in 1997, they
might not have spent eight years pursuing policies with such perverse consequences
for a supposedly progressive political party. While New Labour certainly listened to
research on school improvement, it did not take seriously the research on the
limitations of such an approach. As Denis Lawton put it in his recent book on
Labour Party education policy, ‘Research evidence as well as the views of education
theorists have too often been ignored in favour of the quick-fix bright ideas of spin
doctors and advisers at No. 10’ (2005, p. 142).
But should we really be too surprised or shocked at this? Often the implication of
both the critique of research and the response to it is that once the right sort of
research evidence is in place and communicated clearly, it will always—or should
always—have an influence on policy or practice. But I would suggest that this is,
firstly, to take New Labour’s rhetoric at face value and, secondly, to ascribe to the
Government greater control over policy than it might actually have. New Labour
contradictions aside, should we not recognise that, in reality, policy is driven by all
sorts of considerations, of which the findings of education research are likely on
some occasions to be pretty low down? As the Canadian commentator, Ben Levin,
outlines, these factors include the vicissitudes of the moment, the requirements of
staying in office and the beliefs and commitments of policy makers and their
advisors. More fundamentally, we have to acknowledge that politics is substantially
shaped by symbolic considerations that may have little to do with the real effects of
policies, and that the focus sometimes has to be on what can be done, instead of on
what might really make a difference (Levin, 2005, p. 23).
It is for these kinds of reasons that we cannot always expect policy makers to be
scrupulous in their use of education research or adopt the same canons concerning
its use as education researchers themselves. When I made this point at the
aforementioned Scottish Executive Education Department conference (Whitty,
2005), at least one of those present was shocked that I should appear so accepting of
this situation. Her response was that, as most research was paid for from public
funds, governments had a duty to act on it, otherwise they were effectively
squandering public resources. Now I think this is a good campaigning point, and one
that BERA might want to make use of. But I nevertheless remain of the opinion that
no one, let alone the social scientists we claim to be, can realistically expect
governments to act on every piece of research we produce, regardless of other such
considerations—and this applies