Education Research Director 2021

Through the ESRC 2019 deliver plan, the ESRC will invest in a programme of funded research in education, designed to build interdisciplinary research capacity and enhance outcomes from education through a focus on i) teachers, their training, supply and retention and ii) the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning. The programme of activities outlined here as part of the role of Education Research Director is intended to ensure that research projects awarded through this funding stream have maximum reach, and can take into account the different research, policy and practice ecosystems that support education functioning in the four home nations of the UK.

These are subtly different in the terms in which they understand teacher professionalism, the governance arrangements they employ and the opportunities they create for policymakers, practitioners and researchers to interact, and finally, the depth and connectivity of the research communities they can call on to produce and disseminate relevant research evidence to those parties who need it.

By placing understanding of those differences at the heart of the research programme, this proposal is intended to help more clearly define strategic goals for education research built in and through different kinds of working partnerships, and enhance knowledge flows between the fields of research, policy and practice. This will be achieved by finding ways of engaging stakeholders and project teams in reflecting on core topics that speak to their different interests and experience, and using those discussions to more fully elaborate the theories of change that underpin current approaches to research diffusion, identifying where they could be strengthened.