Research and Policy

Research and Policy: a complicated relationship

A note from Seamus Hegarty

Research in special education suffers from a two-fold burden – sometimes too little is asked of it, sometimes too much! (This happens in all of educational research and in social science research more generally.)

The first charge arises when practical people dismiss research as irrelevant to the ‘real' world of the classroom and the policy office. Research is ‘academic' – a particularly damning epithet – and out of touch with the endless stream of demands made on teachers and policy makers every day. In this view, research – if it has a role at all – is for abstruse books and journals and has little or nothing to do with helping children learn better.

The other extreme is to demand hard-and-fast answers from research. Are there limits to inclusion? If so, what are they? Does team teaching work in special education? What is the most effective way of deploying classroom assistants? What is the best way to teach children with autism? When the requisite answers are not forthcoming, research is once again in the doghouse! If it cannot tell us what to do, what use is it!

To see where research fits in, we have to step back and look at how policy is formulated in practice. Policy makers do not have the luxury of starting with a clean sheet or putting forward ideal-case scenarios. For all the current fashion of talking about evidence-based policy, evidence can ever be only one strand in policy formulation. In a democracy the government of the day has been elected on a political manifesto which, while it may not specify policies in e.g. special education, will embody an ideology and beliefs as well as commitments to the electorate, which lay down parameters for policy making. Governments generally do not to submit detailed policies for electoral approval – Switzerland and California offer interesting, and sobering, counter-examples – but they have to take account of public opinion, whether voiced in the country's media, advocated by interest groups such as teachers unions or disability organisations, or ascertained through specific polling.

Tradition is another strand of influence which policy makers ignore at their peril. Contemporary school curricula and organisation, for instance, owe a great deal to 19th century ways of grouping knowledge and to patterns of life in agricultural societies. There is a strong case for saying that significant change is necessary if schools are to prepare young people for 21st century living and working, but schooling is a deeply conservative institution and effective policy making has to take account of the iron grip of tradition.

Resources constitute another important input to policy. Given that most policy proposals entail more or better trained staff, it is easy to see resources simply as a constraint but that is too static a perspective. Education commands very substantial budgets, and it is instructive to compare how similar budgets are spent differently in different administrations. These differences reflect different policies and highlight the fact that resources should be viewed as a tool and an input to policy, and not simply as a constraint.

Figure 1 The research-policy nexus

All of this provides a framework within which the role of evidence has to be located. In an ideal world all the strands would be pointing in the same direction and policy making would be very simple. It is common, however, for the strands to point in different directions and, in particular, for the evidence strand to be at odds with other strands. Take long school holidays, for instance. There is good evidence that these hold back children's learning and, moreover, exacerbate social inequality because of the disproportionate effect on children who are already disadvantaged. If evidence were the only determinant of policy, it would be easy to put forward a strong case for reforming the pattern of the school year so as to eliminate long school holidays. In reality, the combination of vested interests, deep-seated attachment to the current pattern and resourcing implications would be a major challenge for any such policy proposal.

Research is a further step back from policy making. Its input is through supplying evidence, but it is only one source of evidence albeit a uniquely important one. Inspection, experience and theory also provide evidence that can feed into policy. Take inspection, for instance. This relies on expert judgment deployed in concrete situations. It is different from research and generates a different kind of knowledge about educational phenomena. Research and inspection are not in competition but rather apply different lenses to look at complex realities and gain different insights into them, thereby supplying different kinds of evidence. Experience, likewise, generates another kind of evidence: a reflective teacher who attends to what is going on in the classroom builds up good evidence as to what works in various situations and what does not.

The upshot of all this, as summarised in Figure 1, is that the relationship between research and policy is neither direct nor linear. It is an important, and unique, source of the evidence that should feed into policy. It is not the only source of evidence, however, just as evidence is not the only input to policy.

The challenge to policy makers is when different strands of evidence or different policy inputs point to different directions. Research is often enough not decisive: thus, a particular intervention can be shown to be effective with a particular group of children but it is seldom possible to conduct the tightly controlled experiments that would validate the intervention's use on a wide scale. Even when the evidence from research is decisive – we can demonstrate, for instance, that children with certain patterns of disabilities can be educated well in mainstream settings and do not need to go to a special school – other factors such as parental wishes and mainstream teacher attitudes and competences have to be weighed when formulating a policy that would mandate mainstreaming.

Policy is the art of the possible. The policy maker's task is to assemble the available evidence, assess each strand for its validity and weigh up that evidence in the light of resources, feasibility, etc. Historically, research evidence was often not taken account of in this process, partly because it was ignored or devalued and partly because there was little enough of it. The latter is no longer the case and research evidence is now available across a wide spectrum of educational practice.

There is no longer a justification for ignoring research in policy formulation. If, on occasion, research evidence has to be set aside because of the greater weight of other considerations, at least the cost of prioritising such considerations will be clear. And when research evidence is properly integrated into a policy decision, the policy maker has the comfort of going forward with a robust evidence base.

Further reading

Despite long interest in the relation between research and policy, there was little serious study of that relationship until the 1970s. A particular stimulus was the discovery that social science research was commonly ignored in policy making and, when it was used – as, for example, in the US ‘war on poverty' – it seemed to add little. Harvard-based Carol Weiss was one of the early scholars to problematise the research/policy interface and her writing has helped to shape a more nuanced understanding of the topic. For an international perspective building on Weiss' work, see a report produced by The Centre for Educational Research and Innovation at the OECD (CERI, 1995). For an account geared to education and, more particularly, special education, see Hegarty's chapter in the Sage Handbook of Special Education (2007).

CERI (1995). Educational research and development: trends, issues and challenges. Paris: OECD/CERI.

Hegarty, S. (2007) Special education and its contribution to the broader discourse of education. In Florian, L. The Sage Handbook of Special Education. London: Sage.

Weiss, C. (1977). Using social research in public policy-making. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

© Copyright 2010 National Council for Special Education

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional   Valid CSS!   Level Triple-A conformance icon, W3C-WAI Web Content AccessibilityGuidelines 1.0        Get texthelp - Browsealoud. Click here to download.