The SERA lecture 2103: Scottish Research in a Global Context - Dependence, Independence or Interdependence?1
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Menter, Ian (2014) Scottish Research in a Global Context – Dependence, Independence or
Interdependence?, Scottish Educational Review, 46(1), 19-31.
The SERA lecture 2103: Scottish Research in a Global
Context – Dependence, Independence or
Interdependence?1
Ian Menter
University of Oxford
ABSTRACT
Educational research in Scotland has a very distinguished history and has made
a major contribution in several aspects of methodology, not least in the
relationships between researchers, policymakers and practitioners.
The paper considers the Scottish contribution to the development of
educational research past, present and future and the significance of interactions
at three levels – the UK, European and global. Against the backdrop of the
forthcoming independence vote, it is argued that the historic distinctiveness of
educational provision in Scotland – both before and after devolution - has been a
significant benefit to the research community here. However, there are some
internal dependencies that may need active nurturing, if the benefits of this
independence are to be sustained. Furthermore there are critical elements of
interdependence, at all three levels, which will be important in pursuing an
aspiration to maintain research of the highest quality that will support learners
and teachers in the years ahead.
INTRODUCTION
Educational research in Scotland has a very distinguished history and has
made a major contribution in several aspects of methodology, not least in the
relationships between researchers, policymakers and practitioners (in itself
sometimes an unhelpful categorisation!).
Distinctiveness is one the themes that permeates the text of Scottish
Education, edited by Tom Bryce and Walter Humes, now impressively into its
fourth edition (Bryce and Humes, 1999, 2003, 2008; Bryce, Humes, Gilles and
Kennedy, 2013). As a proud owner of all four editions (and as a proud
contributor and section editor to two of them) I must say it is fascinating to
monitor how things have been changing. Part of this changing scene of course
is caught in the changing sub-title of each edition after the first one:
1 Presented at the SERA annual conference, University of Glasgow, 22 November 2013
19 Post-devolution
Beyond Devolution
Referendum
What will be the sub-title of the fifth edition, I wonder?
But actually, distinctiveness has been a common theme in all aspects of
Scottish education - as the regular chapter by the editors demonstrates (Humes
and Bryce, 2013) - and not least in the coverage of educational research, which
is what I will focus on here. What I would like to attempt to do in this lecture is to
offer a reflection and analysis of Scottish educational research in relation to time
and space - that is to offer a review with both geographical and historical
dimensions. Geographical because we are interested in how Scottish
educational research differs from, but is influenced by, what happens elsewhere -
in the UK, in Europe and globally. Historical because nothing ever stands still
and we are interested in change - where our collective endeavours and
aspirations have come from and where we might be going. And all this is in the
context of an upcoming vote on Scottish independence, deeply significant both
geographically and historically. But I'm actually going to start by considering what
is happening in England - the culture shock of returning south in 2012 has been
even greater than I anticipated and this does help to throw some light on the
Scottish experience. I will then briefly connect this with some of the
developments that are occurring across Europe and globally before then
returning to the central question of Scottish educational research - reviewing
where it has come from, what we have now and what might be the future.
And throughout these journeys through space and time I have a keen
interest in the relationships between research, policy and practice in education,
relationships that I know are of enduring concern within SERA and were picked
up by Walter Humes in his address to this conference last year, recently
published in Scottish Educational Review (Humes, 2013).
ENGLAND - WE'VE NEVER HAD IT SO BAD?
In my BERA Presidential address given at the University of Sussex in
September (Menter, 2014), as well as urging colleagues to become more active
in promoting educational research, as BERA - and indeed SERA - approach their
40th anniversaries, I also offered a critique of current thinking among politicians
and policymakers and their understanding of educational research and its
contribution to policy and practice.
I was present at Bethnal Green Academy early in 2013 when Mr Gove
proclaimed the importance of educational research over political ideology – yes,
he did - and he stayed on to listen to the debate which ensued after he had
launched Ben Goldacre’s report promoting Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs)
(Goldacre, 2013). As most of you will be well aware Goldacre is a medical
researcher and also, like Mr Gove, a journalist. There is not time here to go into
the specific difficulties with this report, which I have written about elsewhere
(Menter, 2013).
20But the general move to this particular research paradigm in England was
also indicated by the huge transfer of resources from the Department for
Education (DfE) to the Sutton Trust which is in turn funding the Education
Endowment Foundation to support RCT type research on a local level across the
country. This lead is also being followed by the English National College for
Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) which is combining the Closing the Gap policy
with the RCT research paradigm in the shape of ‘rolling out’ across hundreds of
schools, with Teaching Schools in the lead, a large scale trialling with ‘treatment’
and ‘control’ schools, of a number of interventions designed to support the most
vulnerable learners. Let’s be clear – this is really important work which, for many
reasons, we must welcome. Indeed, with colleagues in my own department at
Oxford, we are working with lead teachers in teaching schools across the country
supporting them in their development and deployment of research skills.
So, this is not meant to be an attack on such initiatives but rather to say that
to invest all or nearly all the available resource into one particular approach to
educational research is foolhardy and potentially dangerous. No doubt some of
this work will lead to real improvement in educational experiences and outcomes
for some of the most disadvantaged young people. And it is a real opportunity to
get more teachers directly engaged in research activity and thus it is also the
case that we could see the real emergence of teaching as a research-based
profession, something that many here in Scotland have long aspired to.
At Sussex I also spoke about some of the problems and paradoxes of the
Closing the Gap discourse, that is so prominent at present in England. Concerns
about that have actually been increased since then by the revelations about the
report produced by Dominic Cummings, one of Mr Gove's closest advisers
(Cummings, 2013). Here Cummings reintroduces an old deeply pessimistic
account of genetic determination of educational outcomes. If anyone is an
'enemy of promise' it must surely be Cummings and not 'the academic blob'
(these two terms have been used by Gove to attack education academics).
Indeed, the recent book by John Smyth and Terry Wrigley, Living on the Edge,
provides an excellent and up to date account of the flaws in such thinking (Smyth
and Wrigley, 2013)
Recently I have had the interesting experience of hearing another
Westminster government minister, David Willetts, Minister for Universities and
Skills, talk about the importance of the social sciences (Willetts, 2013). This was
a completely different kind of experience. Here was a politician who actually
appears to understand the nature of social science and the contribution it can
make to policy. In citing numerous examples of scientific research during his
speech he frequently spoke of specifically educational research including,
unsurprisingly, work on participation and engagement in higher education. He
also was conversant with the major birth cohort studies that are currently
underway. This demonstrates that it is possible for social science, including
educational research, to be taken seriously by politicians and to make a
balanced and proportionate contribution to policy. Indeed even within the current
hegemony of 'closing the gap' and the positivist takes on educational research,
there are a few chinks of light, what Raymond Williams might have called
'resources of hope' (Williams, 1989).
21However, to finish my section on England I have to return to the wider
concern about educational research that arises from current government policy
on teacher education. Notwithstanding the positive idea of 'teaching schools' -
schools where teachers may develop an increasingly research-oriented
approach to their work, the current attack on university engagement in the
provision of teacher education constitutes a serious threat to the quality of
teacher education and also to the educational research infrastructure. That is
why BERA, now working in partnership with the Royal Society for the Arts (RSA),
set up its Inquiry into Research and Teacher Education (see bera.ac.uk).
By now I suspect most of you will have encountered the comparison that has
been made between Gove's craft definition of teaching in the 2010 White Paper
for England (DfE, 2010) and Graham Donaldson's definition of teaching as a
complex intellectual activity as set out in his report for the Scottish Government,
published a few months later (Donaldson, 2011). Indeed Moira Hulme and I
wrote about this in a paper published in Scottish Educational Review (Hulme and
Menter, 2011). And as has been pointed out, these differences in conception are
not necessarily fully played out in schools and classrooms - there may be far less
difference in teachers' practices across the UK than are suggested in the policy
documents many of is like to study.
One of the papers commissioned by the BERA/SERA Inquiry has reviewed
policy and practice across the four nations of the UK (Beauchamp et al, 2014).
This yet again confirms that England is very much the 'outlier' in the UK and
when we also look at other work being undertaken for the Inquiry we see that
English policy is moving in a different direction to teacher education policy in
several of the nations which are judged to be raising educational standards
(Tatto, 2013).
The mood at the 2013 annual conference of the Universities Council for the
Education of Teachers (UCET) - a conference where the majority of attenders
are from England - was a pretty pessimistic one. There seem to be several
institutions where there is a growing threat to jobs in Departments of Education.
We know that the University of Bath and the Open University are closing their
teacher education programmes - and at least two other leading universities are
considering doing the same.
It remains a great curiosity how it can be that policymakers in England
plough such a different path not only from those in the other parts of the UK, but
also from those elsewhere in the world. This is in spite of frequent reference to
the successes of Finland and Singapore, countries where research and teacher
educational policy have also been developing very different trajectories to those
followed in England.
EUROPE AND THE WIDER WORLD
There are some nations in Europe where there has been significant investment
in specifically educational research. Indeed when one attends the European
Conference on Educational Research it can be very uplifting to hear about and
witness the growth in education doctoral programmes, the emergence of
European summer schools and the range of funded projects that are underway.
Countries including Norway, the Netherlands and Germany continue to invest
22and rapidly developing countries such as Turkey and the Baltic states also
appear to be experiencing rapid growth in educational research. However the big
pan-European research programmes - Horizon 2020 is the current one - rather
like the direction of travel of ESRC funding in the UK - are increasingly focussing
on inter- and transdisciplinary work in which it can be quite difficult for
educational researchers to find a space. You may know that the European
Educational Research Association (EERA) has been working hard to influence
the shaping of social research policy in Europe and while certainly having some
impact, has found it quite difficult to open up spaces that are really fertile for
educational research. Some themes have more potential than others - think
about migration, climate change, terrorism, for example, which do feature as
strategic priorities in Horizon 2020. We may be able to see important
educational issues in all three but we have to work very hard to convince others
of the significance of education - which is increasingly seen as an economic
matter rather than a social or civic concern. If we take science funding as a
whole we also continue to be faced by a strong bias towards research in the
STEM subjects.
I am really not sure we have anything very new to learn from north America
at present but I do note that SERA continues to be a member of the World
Educational Research Association (WERA) - and Ninetta Santoro's lecture at this
conference was presented on WERA's behalf. I do think SERA may find a role
within WERA that is more positive than BERA has so far been able to do and am
encouraged to hear that there is a plan to make SERA 2014 a WERA focal
meeting
SCOTLAND – DEPENDENT, INDEPENDENT, INTERDEPENDENT
Turning now to Scotland and considering the historic trajectory of educational
research, we may start by considering the contribution made to educational
research elsewhere. For the contribution made has been significant, in North
America, as well as across the UK and in Europe. If we look through the list of
past BERA Presidents, many have either been Scottish and/or have worked in
Scotland for a significant time (not unlike the disproportionate contribution that
Scots have made to British governments over a similar period), for example:
John Nisbet; Lawrence Stenhouse; Bryan Dockrell; Wynne Harlen; David Hamilton;
Patricia Broadfoot; Donald McIntyre; Sally Brown; and, most recently, Pamela Munn.
Ten out of 33 BERA Presidents (if I may include myself) have such Scottish
connections, which is a remarkable proportion for a country with approximately
one tenth of the UK population. Having worked in Scotland for eleven years
myself I do not find this at all surprising, given the wider commitments within
Scottish society to education and indeed to scientific reason, elements of ‘the
democratic intellect’ (Davie, 1961). On the other hand, these commitments were
not necessarily unified or united and there were real debates about the nature of
educational research, as we shall see.
23THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF SCOTTISH EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
Largely under the influence of debates on the other side of the Atlantic it became
conventional in the late 20th century to talk about paradigm wars in educational
research. My thesis is that, while it had not been couched in those terms and it
was never as simple as quantitative versus qualitative or positivism versus
interpretivism, there had been an equivalent tension within the very strong
tradition of educational research in Scotland.
My starting point for putting forward this argument is John Nisbet’s inaugural
presidential lecture for BERA, in 1974, the year of BERA's creation, for John was
indeed the founding President (Nisbet, 1974). In that address he suggested a
spectrum of educational research from the 'agricultural' to the 'anthropological',
as set out in Table 1.
Table I: Nisbet’s Spectrum of Educational Research
1 2 3 4 5
Experimental Exploratory Curriculum Action Open-ended
method survey development research inquiry
Empirical Fact-finding New syllabus InterventionistGrounded
educational as a basis for content and theory.
science decision method. Participant
making Field trials observations.
and Illuminative
evaluation evaluation
The agricultural model The anthropological model
(typified by experimental (typified by open-ended
method) enquiry)
Experiments to improve Go and live there and see
your products by what it is like
manipulating treatments
He says:
Categories 1 and 2 represent the empirical tradition, which has a strong Scottish-
American flavour. The Scots – Thomson, Rusk, Drever, Boyd – who set up the first
educational research council in Europe in 1928 believed in it, and the idea can be
traced back to Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain, who as a professor in
Aberdeen University was responsible for the teaching of philosophy, logic, rhetoric,
English literature and language and psychology, and also wrote a book called
Education as a Science in 1879 (Nisbet, 1974:3).
That if you like is the ‘scientific’ or ‘empirical’ end of the spectrum. Is it
different from the ‘observational’ or ‘interpretive’ end? In somewhat stereotyping
and gendered language, Marjorie Cruickshank, in her history of teacher training
in Scotland, argues for the significance of the philosophical underpinning of the
24whole spectrum and for its distinctiveness in Scotland as part of a European
tradition:
The Scot, unlike the Englishman, is not a man of compromise. His genius lies in
rationality. He looks to first principles rather than to precedent. He is logical rather
than flexible. Historically, his links are with the Continent, and in his philosophical
thinking and in his attitudes he belongs to the European rather than to the insular
tradition’ (Cruickshank, 1970:13).
Or perhaps, to use Arthur Herman’s phrase, through the Enlightenment, the
Scots invented the Modern World (Herman, 2003) and it was that combination of
logical thinking and careful measurement and design that gave rise to the
characteristics of Scottish thought and activity, including within education.
It might be said therefore that educational research in Scotland had two
underlying tenets - measurement and philosophy. In the measurement strand
we did see the increasing influence of psychology and sociology. Not all of the
psychological work was without difficulty, at least in retrospect. The now
discredited work of Cyril Burt on IQ was developed in Scotland. But as
Cruickshank pointed out:
In psychology, the emphasis moved after the early twenties from psycho-analysis to
mental testing, as a method of assessing and classifying children. Both the
Professors-Directors, Godfrey Thomson and William McLelland [Edinburgh and
Dundee], mathematicians by training, applied scientific method to educational
research’ (Cruickshank 1970:181).
The nation-wide Mental Surveys in 1932 and 1947 were groundbreaking
studies of cognition and development.
On the sociological side we saw from the 1960s towards the sustained
attempts to look at relationships between social background and educational
attainment, leading to the establishment of the very influential Centre for
Educational Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, under the leadership of
Andrew McPherson. Sadly this Centre also is currently going through very
difficult times and may not survive the current financial constraints on educational
research.
In philosophy, Rusk’s Doctrines of the Great Educators (1918) and
Philosophical Bases of Education (1928) gave students insights into the
influences of the past. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, there was a
disproportionately high number of philosophical outputs from Scottish
universities’ education submissions indicating the lasting influence of this
tradition. Whether the same will emerge from the 2013 Research Excellence
Framework will be interesting to see. So, where does 'the democratic intellect' fit
in? George Davie in his second book, The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect
(Davie, 1986), describes in full detail, the 1920s struggle over the generalist
basis of university education – logic, Latin and mathematics as the grounding for
all education – 'old humanism' in Raymond Williams’ terms (Williams, 1961).
25THE UPS AND DOWNS OF SCOTTISH EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
The institutional histories of the Scottish universities and their antecedents have
a deep and profound connection with the emergence of a Scottish way of
understanding the contributions that education and research make to social
progress and to individual development. Some of this is tracked by Hulme in her
account of ‘research and practice’ (Hulme, 2013). The distinctive role of
philosophy in higher education has certainly been one of the shaping influences
on teacher education but also on educational research more generally. Even
before teacher education had been ‘universitised’ in Scotland, the staff working
at the colleges of education were largely shaped by these ways of understanding
the world. This in turn has had an impact on the way that teaching as a
profession has been defined and developed, particularly under the auspices of
the General Teaching Council – the oldest such body in the world, having been
established in the mid 1960s (see Finn and Hamilton, 2013). That shared
‘assumptive world’ of the education policy community in Scotland, which was so
graphically depicted in McPherson and Raab’s groundbreaking work (McPherson
and Raab, 1988) and depicted a couple of years earlier with a more critical edge
by Humes (1986), was perhaps facilitated by the relative geographical proximity
of many members of that community and their shared education in a small
number of ancient universities (Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St
Andrew’s especially).
But there had been another important and distinctive development within the
Scottish educational community well before the GTCS was established. That
first educational research council in Europe, referred to by John Nisbet in the
quotation above, grew out of the EIS research committee founded in 1928 with
local authorities also closely involved and probably the first teacher research
movement in the world, led by William Boyd at the University of Glasgow (Brett et
al, 2010). Not until much later did the Government, through the Scottish Office,
get involved and provide core funding (Nisbet, 1999). In its heyday the Scottish
Council for Research in Education (SCRE) was a very large scale undertaking,
carrying out up to 40 projects per year, with as many professional staff as a large
university department (Lawn, 2004). Later, in the 1990s, it provided for various
periods of time, the Secretariat for SERA, BERA and for EERA, thus contributing
to the development of educational research capacity at Scottish, British and
European levels.
In discussing the impact of SCRE, Nisbet and Broadfoot (1980) refer to
Dockrell's account:
…the early work of the Scottish Council for Research in Education undoubtedly
made the impact which is characteristic of all science, namely of providing a
technology with which to study education and of influencing the climate of opinion.
He cites the examples of specific projects including the Burt-Vernon Word Reading
Tests, the Scottish Pupils’ Spelling Book and the Scottish Mental Surveys, all of
which had a notable impact because they were responding closely to a specific
‘need’ for information (p.26).
The later trajectory of SCRE is a tale of decline and diminution. During the
1990s funding for SCRE became less generous and when eventually the
26Scottish Office gave way to the Scottish Executive a decision was taken to
withdraw ‘core funding’ meaning that the organisation was entirely dependent on
winning funding, through competitive bidding. Having been based in Edinburgh,
SCRE was then amalgamated with the University of Glasgow as part of the
University’s desire to create a strong research profile, following the creation of a
new Faculty of Education. The remaining SCRE staff therefore moved over to the
west of Scotland, but gradually lost their distinctive identity as an independent
research unit.
SERA is of course a rather different kind of organisation, an individual
membership body. As mentioned earlier, SERA was established at much the
same time as BERA and owes a great debt to John's brother Stanley Nisbet.
Stanley was central to the creation of SERA, as John describes in his history of
SERA commissioned in time for SERA's thirtieth anniversary (Nisbet, 2005; see
also Payne, 2013). Another curiosity of British education is the existence of two
such member organisations – BERA covering the whole of the UK and SERA
covering one part of the UK. There are several researchers who hold
membership of both organisations, but it is notable that neither in Northern
Ireland, nor in Wales (let alone in England) are there ‘single nation associations.
On the island of Ireland, there is however an equivalent body, the Educational
Studies Association of Ireland (ESAI), which is a trans-border association, with
members from the Republic and from Northern Ireland. So, in Scotland, there
has been a tradition of educational research that still influences practitioners
today. Even if teacher research networks have not been fully sustained as
William Boyd or Lawrence Stenhouse might have hoped it remains the case that
the way in which the work of teaching is defined is still much more research-
oriented than elsewhere in the UK. The contrast between recent policy
developments in England and Scotland is particularly strong (Hulme and Menter,
2011), but this is also part of a wider pattern across the whole UK, as a paper
commissioned for the BERA/RSA Inquiry into Research and Teacher Education
demonstrates (Beauchamp et al, 2013). Since teaching standards were
introduced across the four jurisdictions, those in Scotland have always made
research and educational theory more central than they have been in England
and elsewhere. But to finish this section let's return to some more of John
Nisbet’s wise words:
Vigorous research activity or, to use a less pretentious title, investigation into
teaching and learning, sharpens thinking, directs attention to important issues,
clarifies problems, encourages debate and the exchange of views, and this deepens
understanding, prevents ossification of thinking, promotes flexibility and adaptation
to changing demands. Research of this kind aims to increase the problem-solving
capacity of the educational; system, rather than to provide final answers to
questions, or objective evidence to settle controversies. On this view, educational
research is a mode of thinking rather than a shortcut to answers. In the long run, the
real influence of educational research is through its effects on the attitudes of those
who teach (Nisbet, 1974:8).
27SUMMARY
Peppered through the historical account have been a number of significant
developments that have made Scottish educational research distinctive.
However, several have them have been tempered by concluding remarks about
the decline or disappearance of these elements. So, we cannot say that overall
this distinctive tradition has necessarily been sustained, even though its influence
may still be detectable. During the first decade of the twenty first century, the
Scottish Executive funded what appeared to be an imaginative and ambitious
scheme – the Applied Educational Research Scheme (AERS). In association
with the Scottish Funding Council (for Further and Higher Education), a sum of
two million pounds was made available to support substantive research as well
as research capacity building, that was to be largely targeted at looking at the
persistent underachievement of the lowest attainers in Scottish schools. This
scheme therefore was part of that other tradition in Scottish society of striving for
social justice and equality. The money funded a range of activities and was led
from three of the universities’ education departments. A special issue of this
journal focussing in AERS was published in 2007 (Scottish Education Review,
Vol 39, No 1), which is a useful record of what was aimed for and describes
some of what was achieved. Looking back on the scheme now, it can be seen
that a number of individual researchers did develop considerably under the
auspices of AERS, but it is quite difficult to see how these developments have
been sustained; nor does it seem that the underachievement questions have
been resolved in any significant way. (Similar points could be made about the
much larger scheme of this type that was rolled out across the UK, the Teaching
and Learning Research Programme (see http://www.tlrp.org) – and it is
interesting to note that although evaluations of both schemes were
commissioned they were not widely disseminated when they were concluded).
The AERS initiative did demonstrate a serious commitment in Scotland to
strengthen the links between research, policy and practice in education. Those
commitments do not seem so apparent now, indeed it could be alleged that the
central infrastructure for educational research has been under severe pressure in
recent years. A few years ago, at an earlier SERA Conference, Donald Christie
and I examined the somewhat parlous state of contemporary educational
research in Scotland (Menter and Christie, 2011). AERS had finished and not
been succeeded, the Scottish Government seemed to be severely limiting its
funding to a small number of large scale studies, thus reducing diversity and
innovation in research and Education Scotland had been recently established
and seemed to have a limited interest in undertaking or commissioning research.
THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE
And what now? Against the backdrop of the forthcoming independence vote,
it seems to me that the historic distinctiveness of educational provision in
Scotland, including educational research – both before and after devolution - has
been a significant benefit to the research community here. However, there are
some internal dependencies that may need active nurturing, if the benefits of this
independence are to be sustained. Furthermore there are critical elements of
28interdependence, at all three levels, which will be important and have not been
easy to sustain.
Reading through the President's report for SERA this year it does seem that
relations between the stakeholders are improving. And discussing these matters
with Donald Christie recently - two years on from our expression of concern - I
am aware that some of the important connections between teacher education
and educational research are indeed showing signs of flourishing. Indeed work
done for the BERA/RSA inquiry on Research-based clinical practice in teacher
education acknowledges such initiatives in Scotland (Burn and Mutton, 2013).
We have seen important initiatives in this work at Aberdeen - Scottish Teachers
for a New Era, at Glasgow - the Glasgow West Teacher Education Initiative and
at Strathclyde - the Enhanced Partnership Initiative. However, past experience
indicates that we should not be over-optimistic and Walter Humes argues that we
must also be self-critical:
Researchers need to continue to ask hard questions, not only of government, but
also of themselves: that includes an honest appraisal of the value of their own
research.... They also need to make the case within their own institutions for the
importance of educational studies as a discipline. Passive compliance in the face of
corporate decisions to scale down commitment to the discipline will merely lead to
further marginalisation. A combination of political astuteness and intellectual
courage offers the best hope of a healthier future for educational research in
Scotland (Humes, 2013:27).
CONCLUSION
As you approach the referendum vote, matters educational are arguably less
significant than some other policy areas - defence, citizenship and the economy
for example. We know that Scotland has had a very distinctive education system
throughout the history of the Union - that is since 1707. And today we can see
much that is strong, innovative and imaginative within Scottish education,
especially when contrasted with England. So distinctiveness is important and will
be perhaps even more important if there is a ‘yes’ vote. But whether there is or
not, there will also be important relationships externally which will help to sustain
the ongoing development of education and educational research. There is
something to be said for the alliance of educational research around the Celtic
fringe and the SERA links with Ireland, Iceland and elsewhere are very positive.
But the wider European links are also very important and the contribution that
SERA can make to WERA is also important.
My real fear is for England, I have to say, and indeed for Britain. I do think
that BERA has something to worry about in relation to the referendum. So much
would be lost to the educational research community in the other parts of the UK
if the strengths and traditions of Scotland no longer fed in to our discussions, nor
influenced the arguments that can be used against the continuing politicisation of
education in England in particular - but also Northern Ireland and Wales. If you
have read John Furlong's book, Education - an anatomy of the discipline - you
will have seen how important and insightful such contrasts can be (Furlong,
292013). And while Scottish educational researchers have not had much more
success with securing funding from the UK Economic and Social Research
Council than have educational researchers elsewhere, will there need to be a
Scottish Research Council? If so, will educational research benefit or not? So,
whatever the outcome of the referendum, it will be crucial that we all continue to
cooperate and to learn from each other.
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