ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a number of reflections on the arguments made in the papers, drawing out some themes, and offering some suggestions about how evidence might make more productive contributions to the improvement of education. It begins by reviewing briefly some of the background to the current interest in evidence-based education, and focuses in more depth on the particular claims made for randomised control trials in education. The chapter provides some suggestions about how the ideas presented in this special issue might contribute to helping all stakeholders in the educational process become more critical consumers of educational research. In his speech, David Hargreaves compared education unfavourably with medicine in the way that research informed professional practice, and while he explicitly rejected the idea that education should copy medicine, he argued that education should seek, like medicine, a more productive relationship between research and professional practice.
