working in Scottish universities. This undoubtedly provides a detailed insider
perspective that can reveal nuances of policy and practice not necessarily dis-
cernible to the outside eye. If we consider academic work to be primarily about
objective, replicable, internationally relevant research, then much of the research
reported here would not satisfy these criteria. However, the critical and informed
interrogation of policy is a key duty of the academy, and the Scottish context, where
the policy community is small enough for people to know each other by name, this
kind of research and knowledge exchange undoubtedly has enormous capacity for
impact. However, the pressure to perform well in the UK-wide ‘Research
Excellence Framework’ (www.ref.ac.uk) forces universities to focus more on
international research excellence and impact than on the interrogation and deeper
understanding of national policy concerns, arguably skewing the generation of
research to satisfy accountability purposes (Marginson 2015 ). As Gray and Weir
(2014) describe,‘There is a steady trend of appointing people [academic staff in
schools of education] whose research achievements are high so that they can
maximise the university’s academic status and income-generating potential, rather
than people who have intimate knowledge of, and connection with, the national
education system and can exert pressure on policy makers as a result of that’(p.
582). While the situation Gray and Weir describe is clearly a challenge, it must also
be acknowledged that there are academics who can satisfy both of these demands,
provided that performative pressures do not always force them to seek work
internationally in order to progress there careers, and also that‘international’aca-
demics are not always seen as preferable to‘home-grown’ones.
In conclusion, from the analysis presented and discussed here, it seems that there
are three main challenges to the development of a healthy, vibrant and sustained
body of teacher education policy research in Scotland. First, policy research is not
routinely planned at outset of the development of specific policy initiatives or
reforms. When commissioned later on in the process it tends to focus on perceptions
of the impact rather than of the process itself, or indeed of unintended consequences
and potential alternatives, taking political goals as given (Sanderson 2002 ). Such
commissions tend to be restricted to Government-initiated evaluations, rather than
research that would support theory development or the accumulation of a significant
body of policy study research; they also tend not to support research into the longer
term impact of policy, instead pushing for indicators of immediate impact. Munn
( 2005 ) argues that such a conception of policy research suggests a narrow
conception of policy itself, seeing it as a linear succession of events (formulation,
implementation, evaluation) rather than as a complex, messy and iterative process.
This type of policy evaluation research is therefore only one very narrowly construed
approach to policy research, and not one that reflects the approaches and stances
adopted by the authors of the articles discussed in this chapter. Second, teacher
education policy in Scotland is not deemed attractive enough for funding councils:
either the politics of teacher education are not interesting, significant or different
enough to warrant investigation, or else the relatively small geographical boundary
of Scotland is not deemed‘big’enough to warrant specific study. Alternatively,
perhaps the academic community in Scotland has not yet advanced a convincing
580 A. Kennedy