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Negotiating the New Policy Landscape to Make a Difference With Educational Research

Sat, April 18, 8:15 to 9:45am, Sheraton, Floor: Second Level, Ontario

Abstract

Educational researchers concerned with social justice struggle to get their research heard in neo-liberal policy regimes on both sides of the Atlantic. Both the US and the UK have seen a narrowing or redefinition of educational equity (Apple 2006), a critique of the value of educational research (Tooley, 2001), and a reduction in the kinds of knowledge that are regarded as valid evidence (Slavin, 2001; 2004). The institutional landscape of education policy has also been changing with the rise of consultants; charities, educational businesses, think tanks and individual commentators (Ball, 2012; Gunter, 2013). In the UK we have also witnessed the increasing power of the Treasury,and the increasing dominance of economics as a policy discipline. This hostile environment, combined with workload intensification and performative pressures in higher education, has led many academics to occupy a ‘critical and distant’ position, which, while important, has also been easily disregarded by those whose policies we might seek to influence.
In this paper, I argue that a new effort at policy influence is both imperative and possible, working in spaces opened up by the shifts in the policy landscape. But researchers need a clear understanding of who the key policy actors are, the networks in which they operate and how these are penetrated, the timelines of policy formation and the relative influence of different actors at different times, the modes of communication used, the discourses of policy, and the status accorded to different kinds of knowledge claims. They also need a new set of skills and resources to operate effectively in this field.
In the first part of this paper, drawing on my experience as a policy-active researcher in England, I present a map of the new education policy territory in this country. In the second, I describe and reflect upon two of my own recent attempts to act on this intelligence: one an ‘impact plan’ for research on the current UK government’s record on education policy; and the other my engagement with the BERA initiative which is the subject of this symposium. While it is too early to fully evaluate the success of these initiatives, I am able to draw some conclusions about their promise and also, about their implications for the ways in which we see our roles as researchers, the boundaries within which we operate, and the resources we need in order to help bring about policy change.

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