ABSTRACT
In 1939, Fred Clarke was invited to chair a special committee of Section L of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to consider and report on the possibilities of organising and developing research in education in England and Wales. From the 1940s until the 1970s, the State showed increasing indications of being willing to intervene actively in a number of educational domains, and by the 1960s educational research was an increasingly crowded arena. An ad hoc committee of the Association of Teachers in Colleges and Departments of Education was established in 1965 to examine the prospects for research. Sociologists of education generally attended the British Sociological Association's annual conference, and it was that in 1970 in Durham. An example of the problems of educational research in particular was in the research degrees being produced as a basis for the further development of the field.
