the reform package. In choosing this focus, the evaluation will most likely steer
away from any of the underpinning process or political aspects, and will not easily
be able to gather rigorous evidence on particular impact of the reform. The generic
terms of the evaluation brief mean that key issues such as the nation-wide change to
undergraduate initial teacher education programmes may go un-researched. The
Donaldson Report called for undergraduate initial teacher education to move away
from a purely professional focus to include a much wider academic experience for
students, studying a range of different university disciplines alongside the study of
education and teaching. To research the impact of these new programmes on
teachers, schools and pupils would undoubtedly require considerable resource—it
could not be done on the same terms as the studies reviewed here, requiring some
fairly significant and wide-ranging data collection moving well beyond documen-
tary evidence or perception studies alone. So we are left with a situation where six
universities have completely restructured their undergraduate initial teacher edu-
cation programmes in response to the Donaldson Report, in partnership with key
stakeholders (schools, employers and the General Teaching Council for Scotland),
yet we have no way of knowing whether or not these changes to provision will
result in a better learning experience for pupils. Unfortunately, this kind of research
does not seem to have appeal to research councils, being policy-focused and
nationally bound, and nor does it seems to be prioritised by Scottish Government.
The policy studies discussed in this chapter focus principally on critical inter-
rogation of the policy discourse, on matters of values and principles and on the
intellectual underpinning of policy ideas. There are some questions to be asked then,
about how such critiques can be shared and debated with the wider policy com-
munity in order for the research to make a real impact. What is not apparent in the
text of the articles themselves is the opportunity that academics in Scotland have to
engage with the wider teacher education policy community. Being a small country,
and one which currently promotes partnership working through a model of network
governance (Kennedy and Doherty 2012), means that academics are regularly in
meetings, seminars and events with other members of the policy community, and
have the opportunity to form well-connected working relationships with each other.
This allows academic opinion to be expressed as part of wider policy discussion,
supporting informal and ongoing knowledge exchange and policy influence, albeit
acknowledging that some academics fulfill this role more easily than others. While
this natural forum for knowledge exchange exists, it must not be forgotten that, as
Gray and Weir (2014) point out,‘education staff have to be careful not to criticise the
government overtly since it still controls courses, the setting of intakes and the
funding of most research relevant to teacher education’(p. 582).
Another concern around the production and use of teacher education policy
research in Scotland is the issue of who carries this out. All of the authors of the
articles reviewed in this chapter are (or were at the time of writing their papers)
academics in Scottish universities providing teacher education, with the exception
of Barlow and MacGregor who are secondary teachers and were engaging in
doctoral studies at the time of co-authoring their article. All the authors have either
only worked in the Scottish system or have spent significant chunks of their careers
38 Researching Teacher Education Policy: A Case Study from Scotland 579