ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies some current challenges to the use of research in schools. It explains the changing status and role of teachers’ professional organisations as sources of legitimate leadership. The chapter suggests what teachers’ professional bodies could do to support and sustain teachers’ engagement in research. At a symbolic level, the chief executive of the College was one of the signatories in November 2017 of evidence ‘Magna Carta’, along with the heads of the UK professional bodies for medicine and policing. There is widespread agreement about the need for teaching to draw on research and evidence to inform professional practice. Two influential bodies, the British Educational Research Association and the Royal Society of Arts, conducted a joint in-depth enquiry into the role of research in teachers’ initial and continuing education, which found that: ‘teachers across the UK should be supported to become research literate.
