ABSTRACT
The aim of the previous three chapters has been to describe university departments and faculties of education in the UK as they are today. What we have seen is that, as a discipline, education does have some important strengths. Much of its teaching is rated as high quality by students, by employers and by government agencies; there is also evidence of some very high quality research, at best, certainly equal in quality to the very best that is produced anywhere in the social sciences today. In addition, it is a very lively intellectual fi eld, with large numbers of refereed academic journals, learned societies and specialist academic conferences. But we have also seen that despite these strengths, the discipline is fl awed in a number of key ways: its institutions are highly differentiated and, internally, its institutional position is often insecure; it is too dependent on technical rationalist teaching, which, in turn, has implications for staffi ng and for opportunities for their professional development; as a research fi eld, it is epistemologically divided and often theoretically weak, dominated by small-scale applied research; as a result, its research is not always cumulative.
