would need, so it seems, only to show the relevance of such research to educational
practice through their teacher training and professional development courses.
Education Priority Areas (EPAs) were established as a result of Halsey’s research;
Rutter and colleagues’research stimulated the school effectiveness and school
improvement developments in schools and across schools; Burt’s research and
papers were influential in the creation of nation-wide IQ tests for entry into
grammar schools—though rejected in most areas following Vernon’s research.
Hence,‘beware Chicago’where the once prestigious School of Education, by
cutting itself off from practical work in schools in order to concentrate on its
research, having joined the School of Social Sciences, eventually closed down.
41.5 Criticisms of Educational Research
Meanwhile there were increasing criticisms of educational research, which was
gradually emerging in the relatively new University departments of education.
Those criticisms had an impact in England on the political views about the purposes
served by funding research within education departments of universities. That
political understanding was forcefully expressed by Lord Skidelski in the House of
Lords
Many of the fruits of that research I would describe as an uncontrolled growth of theory, an
excessive emphasis on what is called the context in which teaching takes place, which is
code for class, gender and ethnic issues, and an extreme paucity of testable hypotheses
about what works and does not work. (see Bassey 1995 , p. 33)Those doubts were reinforced by the Hillage Report, published in 1998 by the
Department for Education and Employment. Many believed that the money given
to universities for educational research was not well spent. Four reasons were given
for this.
Thefirst reason for the research money not being well spent was that much
research is often tendentious or politically motivated and exclusive of those who do
not share the ideological underpinnings of the research programme—much the
point made by Lord Skidelski quoted above. Indeed, that was a major criticism
made by Tooley and Darby ( 1998 ) in their analysis of research articles in four
leading educational journals on behalf of Ofsted, the inspectorate of schools. This
was inevitably refuted by many in the research community, but the dispute reflected
the fundamental differences, often of a philosophical kind, which underpin the
understanding of education—its nature and its aims—and thereby research into it.
The second reason given by Hillage was that educational research does not
provide answers to the questions Government asks in order to decide between
alternative policies on‘what works’. In response, however, there would seem to
have been clear examples of where research did provide answers, such as in the
examples given above. But, even then, there is inevitably political reluctance to
accept‘what works’where that does not comply with the prevailing political
41 Research and the Undermining of Teacher Education 613