38.5 Discussion
The above analysis reveals a context in which individual academics are clearly
motivated to contribute critical perspectives on the development of teacher education
policy, with the aim of documenting developments and provoking critical interro-
gation within the national context. However, the small-scale, unfunded nature of the
work reviewed suggests a lack of support from both Scottish Government and from
research councils to conduct this kind of national-focused policy research.
None of the ten articles reviewed here are the result of commissioned research
planned at the outset of policy development; rather they appear to be the result of
academics’own intellectual curiosity and desire to provide a critical perspective on
national policy development. It seems that, certainly in Scotland, research into
education policy processes is not planned at the outset of policy developments.
Indeed, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s National Academy of Science
and Letters, in a report on the development of the new school curriculum reform—
Curriculum for Excellence—argued that the upcoming OECD review of progress
would be difficult due to‘The absence of a systematic programme of independent
evaluation of CfE [which] has been a long-standing and key concern of the
education committee’. This lack of planning for research and policy evaluation is
mirrored elsewhere in education policy in general in Scotland.
The Scottish Government’s education research strategy seems currently to
prioritise participation in large-scale surveys such as PISA, together with some
small-scale evaluative commissions, having withdrawn some years ago from
supporting researcher-initiated projects. In thefield of teacher education, the most
recent Scottish Government commissions have been the evaluation of routes to
headship (published in 2014), which was led by commercial consultants Blake
Stevenson Ltd., and the recently commissioned evaluation of the impact of the
Donaldson Report, which has been awarded to Ipsos Mori Scotland, a commercial
market research company. Neither of these commissions was planned at the outset
of the respective policy developments. This perhaps signifies a desire on the part of
the Scottish Government to prioritise the evaluation of what McConnell ( 2010 )
would term the‘programme’strand of policy rather than to focus on either the
‘process’or the‘politics’of policy-making. It is evident that in awarding contracts
to commercial companies, the focus is much more likely to be on the evaluation of
tangible programme outcomes than it is on the detail of the policy-making process
or the politics of the policy context. Interestingly, it is the process and politics
aspects that appear to be prioritised in the articles reviewed in this chapter.
The brief of the Scottish Government-commissioned evaluation of the
Donaldson Review is‘to gather teacher, headteacher and educational stakeholder
views, in order to evaluate current provision and provide an insight into the extent
of the impact of changes that have occurred in teacher education since 2011’(http://
http://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/search/show/search_view.aspx?ID=AUG216
429&catID=). This suggests a focus on stakeholder perceptions of the policy reform
in general, rather than any specific indicators of change in any particular aspects of
578 A. Kennedy