ABSTRACT
This ambivalence towards theory and research is perhaps understandable. Academic writing on education can seem remote and irrelevant to the day-to-day practice of teachers. Traditional teacher training courses in the 1960s and 1970s were often thought to be inadequate preparation for the realities of the classroom. They seemed to focus unduly on securing a knowledge base in the various disciplines (psychology, history, sociology of education) without sufficient consideration of the implications for practice. The value of empirical research in education also started to be questioned. There were in the 1990s some notorious expressions of disillusionment with the field. Hargreaves (1996) supported the concept of ‘evidence-based practice’ but expressed the view that there was little to show for the vast sums of money spent on education research. In 1998 Chris Woodhead, the then head of Ofsted, commissioned a report which questioned the quality of much of the education research that was being produced as being shoddy and inadequate (Tooley 1998). These reports were in turn severely criticised but the questions they raised lingered.
