European Educational Research Journal, Volume 6, Number 1, 2007
doi: 10.2304/eerj.2006.6.1.55
The Social Organisation of
Education Research in England
MARTIN LAWN
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
JOHN FURLONG[1]
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
ABSTRACT The field of education research has grown enormously in England over the last 25 years –
in size, complexity, forms of production and purpose. It has been shaped by governmental, market and
production changes, and it appears to be moving outside the university sector as well. The British
Educational Research Association is trying to map the field and to make sense of its development. This
article begins with a search for relevant data about the key elements in the field – personnel,
institutions, output, etc. – and tries to draw conclusions about the next steps in the inquiry.
Education is the second largest (social science) discipline under consideration, and perhaps
one of the most complex. Structural, historical and institutional factors affect all disciplines
in different ways but in Education their impact has been quite profound.
(Economic and Social Research Council [ESRC], 2006, p. 44)
Introduction
The focus of this article is on the way the field of education research [2] is organised in England; its
aim is to contribute an understanding of some of the ‘structural, historical and institutional factors’
that help shape the field in this one country.
The article began its life as part of a British Educational Research Association (BERA) inquiry
into the organisation of education research across all four territories of the United Kingdom (UK) –
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It was part of a deliberate attempt to conduct a
‘post-devolution’ [3] inquiry into the different traditions, changing policy fields and resourcing of
education research in all four countries. The inquiry itself was initially inspired by a BERA seminar
reporting a similar American study (Ranis & Walters, 2004) of the social organisation of education
research in the USA.
For the purposes of this particular article, the aim was to focus only on England but in reality
the evidence on which we have been able to draw means that it is often very difficult to disentangle
England from the rest of the UK. While policy influences may differ across the UK, publishing
activity and academic community, for the most part, is organised across these political borders.
Of course, understanding the social organisation of education research is not just a question
of how individual universities organise their education researchers internally, nor how the field is
viewed by governing and funding agencies, which are the current ways of thinking about research
organisation and quality (and funding strategies) in England. Rather, we are concerned with how
the scientific field as a whole is constituted: how it is shaped by funding or interest, how it
communicates, and where its researchers come from and where they are based. In other European
societies, this may appear as a rather strange inquiry into a well-established field but, before any
further work of comparison with non-UK countries is developed, simple data about the main
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Martin Lawn & John Furlong
elements of the field needed to be established. Education research in England is heavily governed
by financial controls and market discipline, and managed by university departments. This is a first
attempt for some years to develop a data-based inquiry into its forms, and upon this work will be
built comparative and focused studies.
The Size and Complexity of the Field
In the 1960s it might have been possible for a Professor of Education in England to provide detailed
information about the state of the discipline, using information drawn from a few journals, lists of
theses and university departments of education. However, this is simply not possible today. The
growth of journals alone, representing many sub-disciplines, makes overviews extremely
challenging.
The article is derived from a wide range of sources from university and research funding
agencies, survey data in education and the social sciences, professional sources (journal abstracts
service, British Educational Research Association material), capacity-building surveys and
secondary analysis papers. The article uses all useful sources that we were able to find about the
contemporary field of education research. In some cases, the evidence it produces applies across the
UK, and not just to England.
Recently, the ESRC published a Demographic Review of the Social Sciences (ESRC, 2006)
which demonstrated that Education is one of the largest subject areas within the social sciences in
British higher education today. The only subject that is larger in terms of employed staff was
Business and Management Studies. And, as Figure 1 shows, Education was almost twice the size of
the next largest subject areas – Psychology and Law – and almost three times as large as subjects
such as Geography or Sociology. The size and diversity of the area makes it hard to discern its
organisation and patterns of work. Each Education academic has, to a degree, an obligation to
undertake research as well as teach; this is not just a moral or professional requirement but a
financial one as well. If they research well, and publish, this can bring financial gain to their
institution (it is one of the main sources of finance, apart from student fees).
Figure 1. HESA staff record 2003/04 by selected UOA staff numbers.
56
Social Organisation of Education Research in England
In trying to understand what we might call the ‘topography’ of education research in England, the
issue of size is therefore important. But we also need to recognise that as a field, education research
is not simply large, it is also very diverse and highly complex. It encompasses a wide range of
substantive topics and theoretical perspectives – from early years to lifelong learning, from
pedagogy to globalisation, from neuroscience to anthropology – and employs multiple
methodologies and practices. It has a wide range of different funding sources and publishing
outlets, and employs a variety of researchers in a range of different institutional contexts. Education
researchers also aim to serve a variety of different audiences: making a contribution to the
development of the national and local policy process, to the development of practice, or the
development of social science itself.
In trying to understand education research as a field, it is also important to recognise that in
England, it has been subject to intense pressures for change in recent decades which have
profoundly affected its social organisation. Many of the pressures for change it has experienced
have resulted from the massification of higher education and particularly from the progressive
incorporation of initial teacher education into the higher education sector in the 1970s, 1980s and
1990s. It is this factor that has led to the increase in staff numbers, which, combined with pressures
from the Research Assessment Exercise [4], has increased the number of higher education staff
engaged in research. This growth has been reflected in the growing membership of BERA. As
Figure 2 shows, membership of this, the main learned society in the field, has grown every single
year since 1974 and now stands at over 2000.
BERA MEMBERSHIP 1974 - 2003
M
e
m
b
e
r
s
h
i
p
2000
1800
1600
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
Years 1974-2003
Figure 2. BERA membership 1974-2003. Source: BERA.
The publishing of education research in journals in England has also changed substantially over the
last 20 years – again, partly as a result of this massification. Journal publishing has moved from the
university and learned societies to new education publishers, who internationalised their scope at
the same time. Publishers of journals and books grew rapidly as they internationalised their work.
Education research publication in England became part of a global, English-speaking research
community, which altered its subjects of study to reach wider audiences.
At the same time however, the higher education sector, particularly in England, has
experienced a downward pressure on research from government agencies, and especially the
powerful Training and Development Agency for teachers (TDA) with its promotion of teacher
education as a competency-based activity in which issues of research, theory and critical analysis
have little place. In addition, education research, like many other areas of social research, has
experienced growing pressure to participate in what Demeritt (2000) has called ‘a new social
contract’ for research. There have been pressures to ensure that research is more applied and
relevant to the needs and interests of policy makers and practitioners; there have been pressures,
most particularly through the RAE, for increased research selectivity; and there have been
57
Martin Lawn & John Furlong
extensive pressures on the need to raise the quality of education research. All of these factors have
had a major effect on the field, shaping it in new and ever more complex ways.
Given the size, complexity and many pressures for change facing the field of education
research, it is not surprising that the ESRC Demographic Review of the Social Sciences (2006)
concluded that ‘Education’ as a field is one of the most complex social science disciplines to
understand. As a result, what is needed is not only a description of the current organisation and
structure of education research in the UK, we also need to understand why it takes the form that it
does with all of its strengths and weaknesses; we need to understand what those ‘structural
historical and institutional factors’ are and how they have come to shape the current practice of
education research in this country. In our view, BERA, as the leading learned society in the field,
has an obligation to represent and understand the diverse purposes and practices of education
research in the UK. And in order to do that effectively, we need to know much more than we do at
present about the professional community of education researchers – its social organisation and the
forces and practices which have created it.
In this article we can only begin that process by addressing a number of seemingly
straightforward questions in relation to the practice of education research. These are:
• who undertakes education research;
• where do researchers come from;
• where do education researchers work;
• who funds education research;
• what do researchers research;
• where is research published; and
• what motivates education researchers?
However, immediately a problem arises in that the existing publicly available data we need to use
to address these questions is slippery, insubstantial, does not interrelate, or has been based upon
different forms of analysis and therefore can not be easily combined. Despite this, we believe that
an important first step is to map the field with such publicly available data as does exist; only then
can we be clear about what new forms of evidence are necessary for a fuller understanding of the
field. Because of the changes that have overtaken the field, the data we need to use is no longer
contained within the discipline but in various forms of associated research or governmental
agencies. We have therefore collected and created data from a number of publicly available
sources, including the British Education Index, the Economic and Social Research Council, the
RCBN [5] as well as individual authors.[6]
Who Undertakes Education Research?
What do we know about the people who undertake education research in England? In the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (Centre d’Études et de
Recherches Internationale [CERI], 2002) review of education research in England, it was concluded
that approximately 90% of education research was undertaken by lecturers and research staff
employed in university departments of education. However, we also need to recognise that some
education research is undertaken within other disciplines of higher education and in other places;
determining precisely how much is challenging. In 1999, McIntyre & McIntyre, on behalf of the
ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), conducted a survey of universitybased research on ‘teaching and learning’ being undertaken in a number of highly RAE rated (4,5,
and 5*) ‘non-Education’ departments – in Economics, Linguistics, Psychology, Social Anthropology
and Sociology (this survey had a 53% response rate). As Table I demonstrates, at the time,
Psychology and Linguistics reported significant numbers of staff and doctoral students working on
educational issues, though in other disciplines that might be considered to have much to
contribute, there was relatively little activity.
But of course, education research also takes place outside higher education altogether though
here figures on the numbers of people involved are even more difficult to pin down. We can gain
some insight into the size of that sector from a survey of BERA members conducted in 2002 by the
RCBN (Taylor, 2002) – again part of the TLRP. Table II reveals the ‘non-academic’ education
researchers from a total of 351 responses.
58
Social Organisation of Education Research in England
Staff
PhDs
Economics
4
0
Linguistics
16
36
Psychology
61
24
Social Anthropology
8
2
Sociology
17
13
Table I. Staff/students in other university departments researching ‘Teaching and Learning’.
Source: McIntyre & McIntyre, 1999.
Organisation/position
School (primary and secondary) teacher
Independent research organisation (researcher)
Examination authority (researcher)
Governmental organisation (researcher)
Local government (researcher)
Charity (researcher)
Self-employed (researcher/inspector/consultant)
Frequency
10
11
4
16
15
3
5
Table II. Non-academic education researchers. Source: Taylor, 2002.
The weakness of these data is self-evident; McIntyre & McIntyre’s evidence had only a 50%
response rate and the RCBN survey was only of BERA members and had a relatively low response
rate. But perhaps even more significant is the entire absence of evidence on a quite different sector
of education research – private foundations, think tanks and market-based organisations. Anecdotal
evidence would suggest that these organisations are becoming increasingly important as providers
of education research [7] to government, yet at present there is very little publicly available
information on the size of this sector, let alone who is actually employed within it. In a marketinfluenced information economy, then education research, in some form and at some level, might
be produced by a range of personnel outside the university. This work may be classified as
education research by its sponsor or contractor although it may only partly accede to disciplinary
criteria. However, as we have already noted, by far the largest group of potential researchers are
those employed as lecturers and/or researchers within university departments of education; here
we have relatively good demographic information, as the recent ESRC survey has revealed.[8] For
example, as Figure 3 shows, the age profile of all academic staff employed in education
departments is weighted substantially toward the top end, with nearly 70% of staff over the age of
46 and approximately 22% over 56.
Figure 3. 2003/04 age bands by unit of assessment. Source: ESRC Demographic Review 2006.
59
Martin Lawn & John Furlong
Table III would also suggest that the percentage of older staff has increased over time.
Education
1995-96
2000-01
2003-04
Total
% 50+
Total
% 50+
Total
% 50+
2894
35%
3214
48%
3535
50%
Table III. Permanent academic staff by subject and proportion
aged 50 or over (UK). Source HEFCE, 2005.
The same data source also demonstrates that Education as a subject area has a high proportion of
female staff; again, this is growing over time. Apart from medicine, this is the highest proportion of
female staff of any of the subjects reviewed by the ESRC, and in the period shown, it is the fastest
rising percentage.
Total
2894
1995-96
% Female
46%
Education
2000-01
Total
% Female
3214
48%
Total
3545
2003-04
% Female
56%
Table IV. Permanent academic staff by subject and sex.
Source HEFCE, 2005.
Given this gender profile it is perhaps unsurprising that Education as an academic discipline also
has the lowest proportion of staff on ‘higher’ salaries – with only 4% of staff reporting salaries over
£50,000. With the exception of creative arts, this is the lowest proportion of higher education staff
on higher salaries in any subject area reviewed by the ESRC.
The ESRC Demographic Review also reveals that since the mid 1990s, social sciences as a
whole have experienced significant increases in the recruitment of overseas staff, particularly from
Europe. However, this has not happened in Education, which has by far the lowest recruitment
levels of non-UK nationals amongst the social sciences (see Table V).
Education
Number
Total known
% Non-UK national
3545
3467
4%
Table V. Permanent academic staff by subject and nationality, 2003-04.
Source: HEFCE, 2005.
Education as a field also has the smallest proportion of ‘non-white’ employees (Table VI).
Education
Headcount
Total known
% White
3545
3432
96%
Table VI. Permanent academic staff by subject and ethnicity, 2003-04.
Source: HEFCE, 2005.
The view of Education academics that emerges from this demographic data (and from the ESRC
Demographic Review) is that overall, those employed in this sector of higher education have
shorter careers than other social scientists and start later; they are less likely to be recruited from
non-white ethnic minorities and non-UK nationals than other social scientists; they are increasingly
likely to be female; as academics, they are relatively low paid; and they are in the top age range.
Important though this demographic evidence is, it does have a major weakness in that of
much of it relates to the field of Education as a whole rather than those active in research. As
60
Social Organisation of Education Research in England
McLeay (2004) demonstrates, only about 50% of those working in higher education in the field of
Education are formally defined as ‘research active’ according to the last RAE (2001). Of all the
social sciences, only Business and Management Studies reported an equally large proportion of
‘non-research active’ staff (Table VII).
Social Policy &
Administration
Sociology
Business &
Management Studies
Education
Not classified
%
n
108
12
‘National’
%
n
579
62
‘International’
%
n
240
26
Total
927
89
378
11
16
454
1384
55
57
279
650
34
27
822
2412
309
16
1190
61
464
24
1963
Note: a further 1925 academics in research-led departments were not selected
for entry at all, along with 730 in departments without researchers.
Table VII. Estimates of research quality by researcher in RAE 2001. Source: McLeay, 2004.
The significance of this observation is that the demographic profile of those university staff who are
indeed formally defined as ‘research active’ remains unknown. It may be that they are even older
than the population of Education departments as a whole; those who are younger may be more
ethnically diverse; many may have more conventional research careers with less recruitment after
the age of 40. These factors may be true but the reality is that at present we have no demographic
evidence on how those who are research active within Education differ from those who are not.
Patterns of recruitment, such as ethnicity or non-UK status, may be the consequence of particular
formations of research or teacher education.
Where Do Education Researchers Come from?
But where do education researchers come from and how are they trained? An important piece of
evidence relevant here comes from the RCBN survey (Taylor, 2002), which suggests that
researchers in Education tend to have shorter careers in research-related activities. Their survey of
BERA members suggests that a majority of education researchers do not follow an uninterrupted
linear route into research, from compulsory schooling into higher education and on to a research
background. In fact, just over a third of respondents began their research career after the age of 38
years old; indeed, about 1% of respondents reported taking up a research career at 58 years or over
(see Figure 4).
Percentage of respondents
40.00
35.00
30.00
25.00
20.00
15.00
10.00
5.00
0.00
1 8 -2 7
2 8 -3 7
3 8 -4 7
4 8 -5 7
58+
A p p r o x i m a te a g e sta r te d a s a r e se a r c h e r
Figure 4. Aggregated approximate age of entry to education research. Source Taylor, 2002, p. 14.
The ESRC Demographic Review makes a similar observation when it states that ‘Many academic
staff are “second career researchers” making the switch from the teaching profession mid career’
(ESRC, 2006). This pattern of ‘second careers’, which is unlike most of the other social sciences,
perhaps helps to explain the very rapid growth in recent years in PhD completions. These have
61
Martin Lawn & John Furlong
grown from 149 completions in 1995-96 to 349 completions in 2003-04. With a 134% increase,
Education has one of the largest growths of UK domiciled PhD qualifiers (HEFCE, 2005, p. 38). It
may also help to explain the observation by the ESRC review that Education is a ‘net importer’ of
qualified staff who have trained in other fields. As they explain:
Some social sciences export their students into other academic domains while others depend on
imported trained staff from outside the discipline…. Academic staff trained in the ‘exporter’
disciplines such as economics, sociology and anthropology, are often employed by ‘importer’
disciplines such as Education. (ESRC, 2006, p. 8)
Where Do Education Researchers Work?
The majority of education researchers in England are distributed spatially according to where their
main university bases are. Some parts of the country have very few higher education based
researchers while other areas have substantial numbers. The data in Figure 5, taken from the last
RAE, shows that the highest densities are in the Midlands and London, while the lowest density is
in the east of England.
Figure 5. RAE 2001, education researchers by English region.
University-based education researchers are also likely to be working in very different sorts of
organisations. Some will be working in departments (usually rated at level 4 or 5, the highest, in the
RAE) that either have a consistent record of achieving levels of success or are aspiring to do so.
These will be rewarded financially by the RAE process. Others will be working in departments that
are rated 3 or below and therefore do not benefit from RAE ‘core funding’ to support their research
activities, methods and even subjects of study (Bassey, 1997).
Even amongst the most successful departments [9] there is like to be a difference between
those which have been consistently high achievers and those where there has been less consistency
in their profile over time. In Figure 6 we have plotted these ‘consistent’ and ‘inconsistent’ top rated
departments on the maps to show their spatial distribution.
Further analysis of the last RAE also reveals that researchers working in the most successful
departments are likely to be working with significant numbers of other researchers. Highly rated
departments, on average, have larger numbers of researchers working within them which will
inevitably have an impact on research culture and on career opportunities (Table VIII).
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Social Organisation of Education Research in England
Figure6. Spatial distribution of top rated Education departments in RAE 1996-01.
Social Policy &
Administration
Sociology
Business &
Management Studies
Education
1
-
2
10
3B
12
3A
16
4
21
5
26
5*
36
4
8
10
10
15
12
22
18
27
20
47
31
89
13
11
13
17
36
43
31
Table VIII. Average size of research-active groups. Source McLeay, 2004.
The consequences of this distribution of researchers, across different types of institutions and
different regions, are not clear. When research was locally produced, the regional university was
important; when it is produced in networks or specialist universities, spatial distribution may not
be crucial. However, it is possible that quite different careers are being established in better funded
universities compared with others. Different institutional missions toward teaching, knowledge
transfer and external funding may well create different sorts of opportunities for researchers. These
‘kinds’ of researcher may not be able to transfer into other forms of education research. Again there
is a pressing need to learn more about the institutional and geographical distribution of researchers,
and their consequences.
Who Funds Education Research?
According to the most recent OECD review of education research in England (CERI, 2002),
research funding totals £70-75 million a year, of which the Higher Education Funding Council for
England (HEFCE) provides 60%, the ESRC 5%, the Government 14%, charities 7% and other
sources, mainly industry or the European Union (EU), provide the remainder.
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Martin Lawn & John Furlong
Interestingly, this funding profile is somewhat different from that of other social science areas.
For example, education research is three times more likely to be funded by government than by
the ESRC; it is quite likely to receive funding from charities but much less likely to receive EU or
industry funding. As these sources of funding often relate to different purposes and use different
skills, this suggests that education research works more closely than other social sciences with local
and national policy and in applied or small-scale evaluation. This in turn may have consequences
for the types of research undertaken. For example, EU and ESRC funding both need social science
or disciplinary bases for an application, which may not be needed with more ‘applied’ funding
streams. Certainly this was implied by the comments made on the field by the Education Panel
following the most recent RAE exercise. They wrote:
It is important, however, that Education maintains a significant amount of its research activity
within its version of ‘blue skies’ research whether, for example, this maybe in areas such as basic
understanding of learning and teaching in Educational settings, philosophical and historical
studies of the purposes of Education or developments in the curriculum.
Education researchers ... should concentrate more firmly on winning competitive awards
from, for example, the research councils. It is important that where the submitted research
publications rest heavily on reports to funding bodies, those reports should either be designed to
go beyond description and straightforward evaluation or be supplemented by other output that
contributes in a more significant way to the national and international literature. (2001 RAE
Education Panel)
ESRC evidence would suggest that their funding, over the last 10 years, has gone mainly to
researchers in a limited number of institutions. The top 13 institutions to receive ESRC funding for
education research over the last 10 years are listed in Table IX, though it is important to note that
the topmost institution (the London Institute of Education) earned eight times (approximately £8
million) as much as the lower institutions in the list.
London IOE
Bristol
Oxford
Exeter
Edinburgh
London KCL
Sussex
Bath
Cardiff
Lancaster
OU
Leicester
Stirling
Table IX. 1996-2005 ESRC awards in the
field of Education (graded by income).
In fact, evidence from the 2002 OECD review would suggest that over 80% of research income in
England, from whatever source – government, charities and research councils – goes to just 22
institutions (CERI, 2002). There is then a further mid range of institutions (graded 4 or below in
2001) ‘with a substantial community of research active staff … [who] are finding it virtually
impossible to attract significant funding for research’ (ESRC Demographic Review, 2006).
The general picture of research funding is therefore one of considerable differentiation
between different types of institutions. However, other evidence would suggest that if we examine
average research income per head then in fact many low rated (in terms of the RAE) Education
departments do quite well in terms of external funding (see Table X). Presumably this is because
they have far fewer researchers, which raises the average figure. Clearly, though, this indicates that
there are still many unanswered questions about how education research funding works in England
and its consequences for what gets researched and for institutional and personal research careers.
64
Social Organisation of Education Research in England
RAE Rating
Social Policy and
Administration
Sociology
Business and
Management Studies
Education
1
2
3B
3A
4
5
5*
3,662
7,033
10,072
21,736
25,256
56,191
11,810
19,824
5,135
2,622
9,111
9,696
7,798
13,505
12,588
15,470
24,677
30,018
30,848
13,515
9,203
8,415
9,545
11,317
25,193
15,748
Table X. Research Income, per staff FTE [full time numbers], p.a, by RAE Rating.
Source McLeay, 2004.
What Do Researchers Research?
The main source of information about what researchers have been researching is drawn from the
research assessment data, and to a lesser extent, from publishing evidence. Previous analyses of the
RAE data have used different methodologies, and so the development of education research and its
subjects is not clear. Knowing what researchers produce over time helps an understanding of the
field, how it changes in response to policy shifts; how it accumulates; and if the scope or scale of the
work is related to the site of production.
Kerr et al (1998) undertook an analysis of the 1996 RAE and concluded that research was
concentrated around six basic themes: education policy; subject-based enquiry; teaching; education
management; education; and learning. Three of these were particularly dominant: teaching,
learning and subject-based enquiry; education policy; and educational management. Interestingly,
there is some evidence that different institutions focus on different topics for research. In their
analysis of the 1996 RAE, Bassey & Constable (1997) suggested that certain research topics were
more likely to be associated with more highly rated departments than others. What they called
‘teacher/school/child issues’, ‘teaching/learning issues’, ‘governance’, ‘disciplines in educational
settings’ and ‘methodology’ were all associated with highly ranked departments. Other topics, such
as ‘teacher education’ and ‘curriculum issues’, were disproportionately associated with lower
ranked departments.
A similar point is made by Oancea in her analysis of research groups reported as part of the
2001 RAE (Oancea, 2004). Her analysis found greater than expected numbers of research groups in
departments rated 3 and below (33% of those research groups overall) were on: teaching and
learning; different educational sectors (phase); head teacher training and development; very able
pupils; physical education; environmental education; learner-managed learning; and action
research. Departments rated 4 and 5 had a greater than expected number of research groups on:
curriculum and assessment; school organisation and governance; social inclusion; and pupils’ and
teachers’ characteristics and development. These variations could be a reflection of the differences
of mission of different research institutions or an absence of significant research funding. Overall,
Oancea suggests that the lower ranking groups were much more focused on school matters.
Why should some subjects be associated with the research grading of their university
department? Is this related to the strategic identity of their department (an identity concentrated on
certain areas of work, partly as a result of the RAE assessment)? Alternatively, is this less a
reflection of strategic choice than micro choice; that is, working in a less funded environment and
working on nearby subjects in a less intensive way? Is the ‘free choice’ of Education academics to
research what they wish actually shaped by the organisational and financial aspects of their work?
Again, such important questions can not at present be answered.
A different source of evidence on research topics can be achieved by an analysis of the British
Education Index (BEI). As Table XI demonstrates, an examination of BEI references to books and
articles between 1962 and 1997 suggests that areas of work have altered over time, according to the
criteria employed by the indexing system used. From this evidence, it would suggest that subjects
of study have indeed changed over time, although in relation to questions of scope and scale, there
may be more consistency hidden within this table. What may have changed is the contemporary
vocabulary and the indexer’s categories. Some change over time is to be expected, but at present
we have little understanding about why concepts have altered over time (if they have). Knowing
65
Martin Lawn & John Furlong
this would help with questions about accumulation or communication of results. It would also help
with our understanding about how the field itself is shaped. Does education research, for example,
help shape the policy field or is it shaped by it? Certainly, the ESRC Demographic Review supports
the latter view when it states: ‘Despite its size, the field [Education] also tends to lack the research
autonomy to enable it to engage in policy debates confidently and critically’ (ESRC Demographic
Review 2006).
1962†
Subject term
Universities and Colleges*
Teacher Training*
English, Teaching of*
Audiovisual Aids*
Secondary Education*
Vocational Education*
Mathematics Teaching*
Technical Education*
English as a Foreign
Language
Music Education*
1997
Count
Rank
204
150
103
102
102
90
89
81
58
1
2
3
4
4
6
7
8
9
58
9
Subject term
Count
Rank
Teaching Methods
Educational Policy
Science Education
Educational Change
Curriculum Development
Special Educational Needs
Teacher Attitudes
English (Second Language)
United States
323
302
189
172
160
154
151
146
143
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Mathematics Education
139
10
*includes instances where the term was used with an attached qualifying term.
†
1962 figures cover two years of records - 1961 and 1962.
Table XI. The most frequently occurring BEI subject terms.
Source: Sheffield & Saunders, 2002, pp. 8-9.
Although education research may work on contemporary problems, derived from contemporary
local and national policy, it is not clear whether it reconnects with policy makers. It is not evident
whether it should or is intended to.
Where is Research Published?
There are many questions that might be asked about the role of publishing in the ‘shaping’ of
education research knowledge. As we noted earlier, the field of educational publishing in England
has changed dramatically over the course of the last 25 years. The idea of a distinct ‘English’
education journal is very difficult to discern as its ‘English’ is now international. The proliferation
of new journals and the growing globalisation of the publishing industry have significantly changed
the opportunities for publishing education research; this in turn has had a significant effect on the
careers of individual researchers and on ‘what gets known’ in the field. However, while the
importance of knowing more about the changing structure of publishing may be self-evident, little
research has to date been carried out on its impact.
One area where we do have some robust evidence is in relation to what journals are most
frequently accessed. For example, the most heavily abstracted journals in the British Education
Index are as follows:
List of journals (in descending order):
International Journal of Science Education
Early Child Development and Care
British Journal of Educational Psychology
Higher Education
Journal of Curriculum Studies
Teaching and Teacher Education
School Science Review
Medical Teacher
Adults Learning
Oxford Review of Education
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Social Organisation of Education Research in England
Journal of Further and Higher Education
Educational Studies in Mathematics
History of Education
British Journal of Educational Technology
British Educational Research Journal
Education 3-13
European Journal of Education
International Journal of Educational Development
Journal of Education Policy
Journal of Philosophy of Education
Industry and Higher Education
Teaching Geography
International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology
Educational Psychology
Educational Research
British Journal of Physical Education
System -Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics
Educational Studies
Computers and Education
British Journal of Sociology of Education
Cambridge Journal of Education
Journals achieve a high rating because they were generally established in the UK (in the mid 1970s
to mid 1980s) and have been abstracted for some time. The British Education Index table is
interesting because it suggests a core set of journals, representing subjects of study, which reflect
the sub-disciplinary interests of UK Education researchers in a closer way than RAE data reveals.
Each of these journals would be able, in theory, to show the accumulation of ideas, subjects and
arguments that researchers have engaged with over time.
What Motivates Education Researchers?
Finally, we might ask what we know about what motivates education researchers to do research in
the first place. Unfortunately, questions about the motivations of researchers are often obscured by
perhaps more pressing questions about research funding, often translated as employment funding.
Apart from contract researchers, working on short-term research projects, academic researchers
appear to have the ‘choice’ to engage in research (though as McLeay [2004] would suggest, as many
as half have no wish to). Work on research motivation is limited and we are using work based on a
survey of Scottish research leaders in Education, Technology and Health (with 84 detailed
responses).
Scottish Research Leaders
To inform policy development
and implementation
To enable my career progression
and promotion
To keep up to date in my
teaching
Number of respondents (= 100%)
Education
80
Technology
27
Health
57
44
55
71
51
27
14
(41)
(22)
(21)
Table XII. Comparison between Education, Technology and Health research leaders.
Source: Ozga, 2005, p. 7.
In Education, they were motivated by a concern to:
• make a contribution to advancing knowledge in my field – 85%;
• find out about a puzzling issue – 80%;
• produce knowledge that can make a difference to the wider community – 80%;
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Martin Lawn & John Furlong
• provide intellectual stimulation – 73%;
• sustain independent critical thinking in my field – 73%;
• keep my thinking fresh – 68%;
• inform policy development and implementation – 80%;
• my motivations have not changed – 51%.
These intellectual and practical interests should be related to their published work, and their
engagement, yet it is not possible find further data yet.
Compared with other research leaders in Technology and Health, Education researchers had
strong inclinations to inform policy development in their research and inform their teaching, and
yet they did not assume any relation between career, promotion and their research activity! This
may reflect back the problem of late career entry into education research and lack of career
progression.
Conclusions
BERA began its inquiry into the organisation of the field of education research because of the
expected territorial divisions between the constituent parts of the UK. In this article, mainly
focused on England, the largest of the UK territories, the inquiry has revealed the scarcity of the
sources of data open to us. In addition, these few sources often did not cover the questions we
wished to ask nor did they overlap and allow integration between areas of study. What emerges
from the study, though, is the large scale of the research enterprise; thousands of academics and
others are producing reports, articles and conference papers, in a wide range of journals, from
different types of organisations and with different types of research or evaluation funding (or with
none at all). Judged by the work of the RAE over the past decades, education research has increased
its productivity.
In short, what our study has revealed is a complex field, made more so by the current lack of
useful data to rely on to explain it. However, what data is currently available would suggest that as
a scientific field, education research in England has a number of characteristics. Particularly
significant are the following:
• as a field, it has grown rapidly over the last decades, a factor which has tended to obscure its
structure and organisation;
• university Education academics, who form the bulk of education researchers, are a fast aging,
homogeneous cohort;
• up to half of those academics employed in university departments of education are not active
researchers;
• education researchers work within a different career profile to other social scientists; they are
late career switchers, re-skill for research on the job and have little clear work progression;
• the relation between the field’s funding regime and university departmental strategies has
tended to shape the representations, subjects and work patterns of researchers;
• decades of higher education restructuring and research assessment have increased research
productivity, judged by publication figures, but not field coherence or scientific accumulation;
• university research production (including training, research group support, etc.) seems to be
significantly located in certain areas of England;
• research in education in universities is not confined to departments of education;
• research in education exists more and more outside universities, and it may, in its wider
currency, have changed its form and purpose;
• research in universities appears to be producing diverse forms, from a combination of mission
and funding, which will have effects on career, subjects of study and audience, and which
suggest that a single field of research will be hard to sustain.
Now, this inquiry into education research has to decide on its next steps. This is not just a question
of finding or creating data sources but of finding ways to understand the field. For example, there
are strong suggestions that the field has been shaped by government-directed restructuring of
higher education and by the growth of market-based institutional responses (based on specific
missions and purposes); each of these would produce a political economy approach for future
research. Compared with the mid twentieth century, there is evidence that the field has become
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Social Organisation of Education Research in England
less and less coherent as its learned journals have become commercial, its conferences have
splintered and as its professors shifted their responsibility to organisational aims and removed
themselves from professional leadership. Learning more about this process would also be a
productive question to pursue. Finally, from a knowledge perspective, it is not clear what the field
is producing, how its products accumulate, how organisations should alter to produce research or
to learn from it, and how the relation between Education and the social sciences could be
understood and improved.
BERA has yet to decide what the next step should be in trying to understand more about itself
and its own field of enquiry. What this preliminary article has shown is how little we currently
know about the social construction of education research and how valuable and important it would
be to know much more.
Notes
[1] Martin Lawn served as Academic Secretary to BERA from 2003 to 2006; John Furlong served as both
President and Vice President from 2002 to 2006.
[2] In this article, we are using the term education research (and not educational research) to characterise
the whole field; educational research would be used to denote research geared to improving policy
and practice. This follows the distinction made by Whitty (2006) in his BERA Presidential Address.
[3] In the last few years, the UK has taken several steps towards a political devolution, for example, with
the creation of a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly. This is expected to create significant
difference of policy inside the UK, including in research and education research.
[4] A series of exercises conducted nationally over the last 25 years to assess the quality of UK research
and to inform the selective distribution of public funds for research by the four UK higher education
funding bodies. The next RAE in 2008 will be the sixth.
[5] Research Capacity Building Network – funded through the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research
Programme to support the development of research capacity in Education across the UK.
[6] We would like to thank Ian Farnden, Phil Sheffield, John Gardner and Delma Byrne for their help
with data used in the construction of this article.
[7] Northern Ireland Assembly Government Committee investigating the commissioning of consultants
in Education, for the years 1998-2002; the figures were £4.3 million total to consultancy firms and
£3.8 million (89%) of this to PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
[8] Data is drawn from the Higher Education Statistics Agency survey.
[9] ‘Successful’ means successful academically, judged by the RAE, and so successful financially.
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MARTIN LAWN was the Academic Secretary of the British Educational Research Association until
recently, and he is a co-opted member of the Council of the European Educational Research
Association. He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, working on inter
disciplinary projects on the history of education research in the twentieth century, and on the use
of data to govern education systems. Correspondence: Professor Martin Lawn, Centre for
Educational Sociology, University of Edinburgh, St John’s Land, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8
8AQ, United Kingdom ([email protected]).
JOHN FURLONG is Director of the Department of Educational Studies at the University of
Oxford. From 2003-2006 he served as Vice President and then President of the British Educational
Research Association. Correspondence: Professor John Furlong, Department of Educational Studies,
University of Oxford, 15 Norham Gardens, Oxford OX2 6PY, United Kingdom
([email protected]).
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