Conference Agenda

This symposium will contribute to studies of how changing modes of governance are altering knowledge flows in education, and impacting on the relations between research, policy and practice in different policy settings (Grek, 2024). The symposium explores whether it makes sense to understand this changed landscape for knowledge making and knowledge flows in terms of national policy settlements; or whether drilling down within national contexts reveals more fragile entanglements between a range of stakeholders whose interests are not the same (Verger et al 2018; Landri, 2025).

The papers have developed through a study of the relations between research, policy and practice in the four nations and jurisdictions of the UK: Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England. Education policy is a devolved issue in the UK, so although England dominates in terms of system size, the conditions it operates under are not replicated elsewhere (Greany et al, 2025). Instead, each jurisdiction organises and steers the relations between research, policy and practice in different ways. In part this is because of their longer social histories and the different policy instruments in place. While there is shared use of the language of evidence-informed or research- informed policy and practice, these do not lead to similar effects. Discussion will focus on whether researchers can still find spaces from within a particular policy settlement to do things differently and the extent to which this depends upon recognising and redefining the opportunities to work with others on topics of mutual concern.

To answer these questions, the symposium draws from a research programme designed to better understand the terms upon which research, policy and practice interact in the four nations and jurisdictions of the UK. The research included

• A metanarrative review of how the assumptions underpinning evidence-based policy have changed over time, in the light of the evidence of evidence use;

• Policy landscape mapping, used to understand what drives the dominant forms of knowledge exchange in different policy settlements

• Case studies of research partnerships in the four nations and jurisdictions of the UK that involve a range of diverse stakeholders working together on topics of mutual concern.

The methods used included: discourse analysis of key policy documents; internet searches; and interviews with participants. We anticipate that the issues raised on how to balance the local and the national will have relevance in other national settings across Europe (Lillejord, 2025).

This paper reconsiders the role research can play in reframing the questions policy asks, and the kinds of alliances that can be built to help rebalance whose knowledge counts. The paper begins by considering the terms in which education has been recast as a policy problem and where research fits in. While this issue is often discussed by focusing on supranational organisations’ influence on national policies (Steiner-Khamsi, Martens and Ydesen, 2024), the focus in this paper is different. It looks down below the national level to what happens on the ground in different policy settlements, taking the 4 nations and jurisdictions of the UK as its case. In each jurisdiction, politicians choose how to frame education’s purposes, and draw on a variety of sources to do so. They also decide on the policy instruments they will use to redistribute responsibilities to act within a given policy frame (Le Galès, 2011). In so doing they reshape the relationships between research, policy and practice. As the gaps between the intended outcomes policy seeks and what happens on the ground become more visible, current arrangements set in motion a different dynamic to knowledge flows in education (Moss, 2025). One way of reviewing the gap between intentions and outcomes is to treat these as problems in implementation (Best and Holmes, 2010; OECD, 2025). But they can also be seen as problems of interpretation: the “facts of the matter” are seldom beyond dispute and can be read in many different ways (Greenhalgh and Engebretsen, 2022; Pawson and Tilley, 2024). Indeed, problems that resist solving from within a policy frame provoke contestation and conflicts in the public square that new modes of governance struggle to contain (Baroutsis and Lingard, 2025). Discussion will focus on how researchers in different policy settlements can respond to these changing conditions in ways that strengthen critical action.

Baroutsis, A., & Lingard, B. (2025). Understanding media influences on education policy in contexts of changing digital media cultures. Learning, Media and Technology, 1–15. Best, A., & Holmes, B. (2010). Systems thinking, knowledge and action: towards better models and methods. Evidence & Policy, 6(2), 145-159. Greenhalgh, T., & Engebretsen, E. (2022). The science-policy relationship in times of crisis: An urgent call for a pragmatist turn. Social Science & Medicine, 306, 115140. Le Galès, P. (2011). Policy instruments and governance. The SAGE handbook of governance, 1, 142-159. Moss, G. (2025) Knowledge-making in a crisis: English education during and after Covid-19. Oxford Review of Education, 51(6), 868-884. OECD (2025), Everybody Cares About Using Education Research Sometimes: Perspectives of Knowledge Intermediaries, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/5ef88972-en Pawson, R., & Tilley, N. (2004). Realist evaluation. https://www.copasah.org/uploads/1/2/6/4/12642634/realistic_evaluationpawson.pdf Steiner-Khamsi, G., Martens, K., & Ydesen, C. (2024). Governance by numbers 2.0: policy brokerage as an instrument of global governance in the era of information overload. Comparative Education, 60(4), 537–554.

This paper reconceptualises how researchers navigate the boundaries between research, policy and practice in different policy spaces in the UK. The paper draws on interviews conducted with the nine Principal Investigators (PIs) who participated in the ESRC Education Research Programme 2021-2026. As part of the Programme, the PIs have been addressing a range of policy relevant themes using different methodological approaches and working in different local and national settings in the UK. I use the data from the interviews to introduce a language of description (Bernstein, 2003) organised around three categories of analysis that accounts for the difference in researcher strategies. These are: Reading the context. Before engaging with policy and practice, researchers pay attention to how their topic is framed and named in policy and practice. Based on their reading, researchers orient towards the context in different ways. These can be conceptualised as operating on a scale between alignment (problem-solving, solutions) and disruption (problematising, re-framing). Interacting with the context. When planning, conducting and disseminating their research, researchers interact with policy and/or practice in different ways. These can be conceptualised on a scale between detached (insulated, independent) and embedded (enmeshed, involved). Influencing the context. Researchers attempt to influence policy and practice in different ways, conceptualised on a scale between product (fixed, sequenced, tangible) and process (open-ended, iterative, experiential). The paper concludes by arguing that the categories of ‘reading’, ‘interacting’ and ‘influencing’ offer a vocabulary that helps to capture and sensitize the complex ways in which researchers interact with policy and practice and make more transparent the strategies they choose. We consider the implications of these categories in relation to the changing conditions and potentials of educational research in Europe

Bernstein, B. (2003). Class, codes and control, (volume 3): towards a theory of educational transmissions. Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Across the devolved UK education systems, partnerships are used to further policy goals, but also to reframe how issues are understood and redefine whose knowledge counts (Moss et al, 2022). We recognise that the challenges, goals, and opportunities that partnerships face, are shaped by long-term national political cultures and governance structures, as well as their immediate geographical and temporal contexts (Wallin, 2007; Ozga, 2025). In this paper we explore how particular partnerships actually work within the immediate political, institutional and historical contexts within which they operate in the UK (Hora & Millar, 2023:68; Nicholson and Wilkins, 2025). We begin by presenting insights from our mapping of the education policy landscapes in the UK (See OECD, 2025, pp70-73). This sets the scene for analysing how two particular partnerships have formed and been sustained over time. The case studies combined internet searches with interviews with key local actors engaged in the partnership including researchers, funders, local government and community groups. This enabled us to trace partnerships from their origins and inception through outcomes to predictions about their long-term effects. Together our findings show that navigating these complex systems requires actors to develop context-specific forms of expertise that can adapt to local values and institutional priorities. Partnerships develop through ongoing negotiation and coordination within complex policy systems that are shaped by both internal governance and external factors (Grek, 2024; Lingard, Baroutsis & Sellar, 2021). The finding that actors do not necessarily share common goals and that this can lead to disparate narratives emerging from shared activities creates difficulties for using standardised approaches to measure their success. But it also creates opportunities for those involved to learn from each other through a place-based lens. Discussion will explore the role that locally based partnerships can play in diverse national settings.

Grek, S. (2024). The new production of expert knowledge: education, quantification and utopia. Springer Nature. Hora, M. T., & Millar, S. B. (2023). A guide to building education partnerships: Navigating diverse cultural contexts to turn challenge into promise. Taylor & Francis. Lingard, B., Baroutsis, A., & Sellar, S. (2021). Enriching educational accountabilities through collaborative public conversations: Conceptual and methodological insights from the Learning Commission approach. Journal of Educational Change, 22(4), 565-587. Moss, G., Bradbury, A., Braun, A., Duncan, S., Levy, R. and Harmey, S. (2022) Research evidence to support primary school inspection post-COVID. UCL Institute of Education: London, UK OECD (2025), Everybody Cares About Using Education Research Sometimes: Perspectives of Knowledge Intermediaries, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/5ef88972-en Nicholson, P. M., & Wilkins, A. W. (2025). Intermediaries in local schooling landscapes: policy enactment and partnership building during times of crisis. Journal of Education Policy, 40(1), 89–110. Ozga, J. (2025). Politicisation, depoliticisation and knowledge in education recovery planning after Covid-19. Oxford Review of Education, 51(6), 819-835. Wallin, D. (2007). Policy window or hazy dream? policy and practice innovations for creating effective learning environments in rural schools. Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, (63).