From an age of measurement to an evidence era? Policy-making in teacher education in England

ABSTRACT

The Department for Education (DfE) in England seeks to determine the actions of educationists in both the public and private sectors through the use of targeted instructive documents and white papers where broader policy intention is presented. Since 2010, as we will show, there has been a shift in the nature of such papers towards justification with ‘evidence’ and transparency through referencing in a ‘scientific’ style, with ramifications for both how policy is justified and the contestation of practices in education. This leads us to suggest that we are in an ‘evidence era’ where a dominant rationalized myth centres on the use of ‘evidence’ to justify practice. Meanwhile, how ‘evidence’ is constructed as research is undertaken, and how it is transformed as it enters a political environment, are important questions that are often overlooked. In this text, we analyse the change in ‘evidence’ practices before and after 2010, consider why the practices changed, and infer the effects the changes have had on the wider education environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Evidence
• policy
• teacher Education
• new Public Management

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the TeachersCareers team for insightful discussions and helpful advice during the analysis. We would particularly like to thank Katharine Burn (University of Oxford) for her help in identifying and obtaining documents for the analysis, as well as Tore Sørensen and Xavier Dumay (UC Louvain) for their comments and feedback on drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank our interviewees for sharing their time with us and providing valuable insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As education is a devolved matter in the United Kingdom, even though we are talking of a Department (and cabinet ministry) in the Parliament of Westminster, the policies of the Department for Education only apply to England.

2. ‘Evidence-based practice’ was a term furiously debated in England by Martyn Hammersley and David Hargreaves during the first decade of this century – see Hammersley (2007).

3. We should note that due to the many meanings of the word ‘evidence’ depending on who uses it and in what context, we here consequently use quotation marks to denote that it is a fluid, unfixed, concept that we do not attempt to pin down.

4. See this 2016 (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/use-misuse-and-abuse-research-education-white-paper accessed 15.07.2019) blog post of Professor Ian Menter for an instance of this occurring in the white paper ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’ (DfE 2016).

5. An example here would be the attacks on academia by Michael Gove both as shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families (2007–2010) and later Secretary of State for Education (2010–14), through terms such as ‘enemies of progress’ and the ‘blob’ – see Adamson et al. (2017); Childs and Menter (2013).

6. An overview of the documents analysed can be seen at https://www.teacherscareers.eu/research-material/(accessed 21.03.2020).

7. We should note that after completing our analysis for this article, the DfE published a paper setting out an ‘ITT Core Content Framework’ which was written by a working group including at least two leading education academics. This document is unusual in including as an appendix an extensive list of research references which apparently underpin each section of the document (DfE 2019c). ‘A full bibliography is provided with suggested reading, which can be shared with trainee teachers to support their critical engagement with research. This evidence includes high-quality reviews and syntheses, including meta-analyses and rigorous individual studies’ (p.4). This provides yet more evidence of the evidence era we are outlining in our paper! Once more, it arguably is a continuation of a weak trend first observed in the recruitment and retention strategy, where key actors in the education sector promote and justify government policy by granting their ‘seal of approval’.

Additional information

Funding

The project leading to this article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 714641).

Notes on contributors

Jo B. Helgetun

Jo B. Helgetun, is Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Louvain. His current research focuses on the national trajectories of education policy reform and their embeddedness in the global education policy field, particularly teacher education policy in England and France. While his past work was on the new governance of Educational Research, comparing trajectories, turns and transformations in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Norway.

Ian Menter

Ian Menter, is Professor Emeritus of Teacher Education at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Associate at Kazan Federal University, Russia. His current research focuses on knowledge production, policy issues, and practices in teacher education, as well as the labour market for teachers and teacher’s work. He is a former president of both BERA (2013-15) and SERA (2005-07)