ABSTRACT
In this context, teachers have suffered under any number of lashes, and one of the most common justifications for this process of deprofessionalisation has been research. Tom Bennett took a sabbatical at Corpus Christi College Cambridge where he spent a term on a Teacher Fellowship, during which he spent time outside of the classroom to research, among other things, the origins of the research that permeated the profession. For a start, he discovered very quickly indeed that a great deal of educational research was simply poorly disguised advocacy, dressed in the gown of authority. Educationalists and academics from many of the UK's top institutions spoke for free, as did prominent teacher voices, representatives of intermediary institutions, teacher leaders, unions, charities. But education should certainly be an evidence-augmented profession. Where possible, evidence must be the basis of decisions. People aspire to become research-literate instigators of research; educated filters and guardians of our own professionalism.
