ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to explore these questions. My view is that things have certainly improved substantially in the intervening years; signifi cantly increased funding (it doubled during the last RAE period) and the cumulative impact of research assessment exercises have, I believe, driven up quality. There has also been a fundamental transformation in the seriousness with which governments have taken educational research. For example, in the early 2000s the Labour government funded a number of important initiatives to support the development of educational research in England. These included the establishment of a National Educational Research Forum (1999-2006) to advise on the strategic direction for educational research and the setting up of the EPPI-Centre to undertake and encourage systemic reviews of educational research to parallel those undertaken within medicine by the Cochrane Collaboration. They also funded a number of new research centres, such as the Centre for Research on the Wider Benefi ts of Learning and the Millennium Cohort Study at the London Institute of Education. At the same time, the ESRC funded the National Centre
for Research Methods, the fi rst of its kind internationally. Other government agencies in England – the TDA, General Teaching Council for England and the British Educational Communications Technology Authority, to name but three – also developed strong research profi les. And in Scotland, the Higher Education Funding Council and the then Scottish Executive Education Department jointly funded the Applied Educational Research Scheme specifi cally to develop research capacity (Taylor et al., 2007). But perhaps most signifi cant of all was the funding of the UK-wide Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). At £43 million, TLRP (2000-2012) was the largest ever single social-research programme funded in any discipline.
