ABSTRACT
Between 1991 and 1996 I acted as coordinator of the research programme on ‘Innovation and Change in Education: The Quality of Teaching and Learning’, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). This was a major programme of educational research which aimed to increase our understanding of teaching and learning in the context of the reforms introduced by the 1988 Education Reform Act. The programme consisted of 10 projects, based at various centres in England and Scotland, and involved many of the UK’s leading educational researchers. My role as coordinator was to ensure that the programme achieved its full potential, in terms of both its contribution to academic knowledge and its value for non-academic users. As Howard Newby, then Chief Executive of ESRC, put it at our first programme meeting: my role was to ensure that the programme amounted to ‘more than the sum of its parts’.
