university departments in the different subjects inevitably followed. Given so many
universities, following the expansion in the 1980s and subsequently, and given an
increased competitiveness between universities for students, one’s place in the league
table became important for reputation and funding.
Education, now being a‘discipline’along side all the others in the university, is
subject to the same pressures. The funding arrangements were changing as funding
was to be concentrated in fewer university centres for research. In 2001, 81 uni-
versity education departments submitted altogether 2045‘active researchers’for the
RAE. The 50 departments assessed as 3 (that is, at national levels of excellence)
received no funding and the 18 rated 4 had their funding cut back.
Therefore, as the overall unit of resource has fallen, getting high grades in
research, based mainly on publications, has become increasingly important and
therefore consequences follow, namely,
- focus on internationally significant research (the ‘big ideas’ of universal
application); - publication of such research in journals high on the Social Science Citation
Index; - a new and inflated market in the appointment of academics who have so
published; - less significance given to more practically focused research which cemented the
relationship between education and schools—the very fruitful‘action research’
referred to above.
To aid this process, there has emerged a‘league-table’of journals, publication in
which would be one‘impact measure’and therefore would contribute to the quality
rating of the paper published. Thus, the‘Thomson Reuters Impact Factors’, with
reference to Taylor and Francis publications for 2014, measures the impact value of
their many journals related to educational studies and research. For example, the
citation index for theBritish Journal of Educational Studieswas 0.444 whereas that
for theOxford Review of Education(a‘rival’journal) was 0.739, and for the Journal
of Educational Policy, 1.318. It is clear therefore which journals one should strive
to publish in if one is to be judged a researcher of international quality.
The effects of all this on the idea of the university and of the role of academics
within them are several, affecting necessarily the nature of education departments
and, for many, their survival.
First, there is a growing hierarchy within the university sector, at the top of
which are the‘research universities’, the departments within which (having being
judged‘internationally excellent’in their research) are much better funded and
more able to attract profitable overseas students—compared to other universities
funded in effect as‘teaching universities’. Increasingly universities are, at a time
when there is a declining‘unit of resource’, to close down departments which are
becoming afinancial burden.
Second, within such university departments, there is an increased division
between those who do research (and who need time and resources to research and to
618 R. Pring