The impact of research on education policy in an era of evidence-based policy

Abstract

Currently, when there is a lot of political talk about the need for ‘evidence-based policy’, and when public policy seeks to calibrate research quality and impact, there is a pressing need to reconsider the relationships between education/al research and education policy. This article seeks to do this, beginning with considerations of the contested and changing character and practices of education, education policy and education/al research, and the competing and complex definitions of the meaning of research impact. The article considers the distinctions between research of and research for policy. The apparently disjunctive cultures of academic research and policy-making in education are documented for understanding research–policy relationships in education. Yet, there is also a need to acknowledge the overlap between these cultures, particularly in respect of the categories of policy-makers and researchers and movement across the categories in career terms. The article demonstrates that research affects policy in multiple, yet mediated ways in varying timeframes. The more academic research usually has its effects in the longer term, impacting the assumptive worlds of policy-makers, while commissioned research seeks more direct shorter-term impact. Finally, we also need to consider the capacities of policy-makers and educational systems to be receptive to research.

Keywords:

• educational research
• evidence
• impact
• policy-making
• research brokering

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Dr Sam Sellar and Professor Trevor Gale for their useful comments on this paper. A version of this paper was first given as a Public Lecture at The University of New South Wales, Faculty of Social Sciences, on 18 November 2011. I thank Kal Gulson and Matthew Clarke for inviting me to give that Lecture and for the feedback I received on it.

Notes

1. Cooper and Levin (2010, p. 351) suggest a number of almost interchangeable descriptors to refer to research–policy relationships, namely ‘knowledge mobilisation’, ‘knowledge utilisation’, ‘research use’, ‘research uptake’ and ‘research value’ and also suggest that each term is useful in its own way, but that none is ideal. Knowledge transfer is another common descriptor.

2. Gale and Densmore (2003) note that Easton was actually referring to politics and political systems here and in so doing seeking to delimit the concerns of political science. Thus, it might be best to see policy as the authoritative allocation of values framed by politics and mediated by the logics of practice of the state and its claim to the application of the universal (Bourdieu, 1998).

3. This is why in actuality and in a normative sense there is not or should not be a clear incommensurability between research and policy-making cultures.

4. International relations until the current era of globalisation have worked within a Westphalian frame, which recognised the political sovereignty of nation-states and which saw international relations as bi- and multilateral relations between sovereign nations. Under globalisation, there have been some challenges to national sovereignty with the nation-state now functioning in different ways. Politics have been rescaled so that now we see global and regional agreements, supranational (e.g. the EU) and multilateral politics and a related reworking of national politics.

5. Luke and Hogan (2006) seek to reconstitute an approach to evidence-based policy drawing upon both qualitative and quantitative research data and the insights from critical educational research and theory. In so doing, they describe an approach to the research–policy relationship being put in place, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, in contemporary Singapore.

6. See Munn (2008) for an account of the AERS in Scotland, which sought to develop research capacity of both educational researchers and policy-makers and to strengthen the relationships between the two. The TLRP in England under New Labour also had similar goals. These were both more progressive attempts to align research and policy-making and make educational research more policy relevant.