Voices from across the teaching sector have warned that the profession is drifting further from a vision of being ‘research-engaged’, 10 years after the goal was proposed in a landmark report.

In a new special issue of the magazine Research Intelligence, published by the British Educational Research Association (BERA), teachers, teacher-educators and academics reflect on the state of teaching a decade after the publication of Research and the Teaching Profession. They argue that recent policy has constrained teachers’ capacity to become ‘research-literate’, which the original report identified as a hallmark of high-performing education systems.

Research and the Teaching Profession was a joint 2014 publication by BERA and the Royal Society for Arts (RSA) and drew on an extensive inquiry into the role of research in teaching and teacher education.

It argued that teachers should be equipped, through professional development, to use existing education research, and their own research inquiries, to understand and resolve issues affecting their day-to-day practice.

Ten years on, the new special issue asks how far that agenda has been realised. Although the picture across the four nations is mixed, the editors’ overall verdict is that teaching and teacher education are straying from the original BERA/RSA vision. Several contributors are particularly critical of recent policy developments in England which have weakened teachers’ active engagement with research.

The editors argue that this should be a “galvanising moment” for the teacher-education sector to take more ownership of the knowledge base of teachers and the frameworks that shape teaching.

Clare Brooks, Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, and a co-editor, said: “The original report made a powerful case that research is what holds together different aspects of teachers’ professional learning. If teachers know how to work with research, they can adapt and innovate regardless of what the job throws at them.”

“Despite that, most teacher education policy over the last decade has failed to meet the standard the 2014 report was trying to set. In general, the system is actually diverging from the clear direction set out by the original report.”

A central argument in Research and the Teaching Profession was that effective teaching forms a feedback loop with academic research. In the best-performing systems, teachers were shown to continually reflect on, devise and evaluate different research-based ideas to improve their practice which, in turn, could inform wider scholarship.

As a result, the report argued that Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and Continuing Professional Development should prepare teachers to be “active agents in research”, and that this would lead to a continually self-improving education system.

Subsequent ITE reforms have been handled differently by the devolved governments. In England, the Carter Review (2015) and Initial Teacher Training Market Review (2022) were led by small, government-appointed, ‘expert’ groups. Contributors to the special issue argue that these narrowed the scope of teacher education, resulting in a limited framework for ITE with little room for research engagement.

The most recent iteration of this is the Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework which draws heavily on one strand of education research, known as the ‘what works’ or ‘new science’ approach. The special issue argues that it neglects wider scholarship, including respected work which addresses the social, emotional and cultural aspects of teaching.

“Recent frameworks have ignored the fact that a teacher needs to understand why things work and, fundamentally, what teaching is for,” Brooks said. “They prescribe that teachers should build positive relationships or should handle misbehaviour; but there is nothing in there to help teachers understand how to do that, or why children might misbehave in the first place.”

“Too often the assumption seems to be that teachers are widgets in a factory,  reproducing the same set of processes. I often meet new teachers who are absolutely knocked sideways by the reality of school life, because it just doesn’t represent the imaginary classrooms in that pre-prepared script.”

The story of the last decade is, however, not only one of governments ignoring calls for research-informed practice. Unlike in England, the Welsh government has put research and enquiry at the heart of recent ITE reforms.

The special issue notes that this transition has been challenging: not all school-university partnerships are functioning efficiently, and there are wider teething problems linked to the simultaneous introduction of a new curriculum.

Alongside this, however, some partnerships are producing fresh and exciting collaborations, suggesting that the shift to a ‘research-rich’ culture in any system will take time, and will tend to be less smooth than the 2014 report envisaged.

The special issue also presents evidence of research-engaged teaching elsewhere, both in the UK, and beyond. It includes accounts from current teachers, whose schools make room for them to research aspects of their practice. David Montemurro, from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, also highlights how the Ontario College of Teachers involves government, educationalists and practitioners in its routine reviews of ITE. This has enabled ITE programmes to adapt constructively to contemporary challenges, for example issues relating to equity, sustainability, and truth and reconciliation with Canada’s indigenous communities.

For a similarly responsive system to emerge in the UK, the editors argue that the sector should be defining the knowledge base for teacher education itself. Brooks and other academic colleagues have previously argued for a complete, sector-led reappraisal of existing frameworks, amid mounting evidence that the top-down moulding of teacher education is abetting the recruitment and retention crisis.

“If I was to be self-critical, we have spent too long waiting for policy to tell us what to do, when we should be the ones driving it,” Brooks added. “Academics and policy-makers cannot predict everything that teachers need; usually, it is teachers and teacher educators themselves who best understand what’s needed at the chalk-face. We urgently need a better approach to professional development that empowers them to investigate those challenges systematically, to research and evaluate solutions.”