TLRP: academic challenges for moral purposes

Introduction

TLRP is the largest independent, coordinated research initiative in education that the
UK has ever known. The rhetoric is strong, and the Programme’s projects and
activities are designed: ‘to lead to significant improvements in outcomes for learners
at all ages and stages in all sectors and contexts of education and training, including
informal learning settings, throughout the United Kingdom’ (Phase III Specification).

Even with the commitment of some £26m, this is an extremely bold aim. There are
also goals concerning multi-disciplinary working, broadening methodologies,
deepening research capacity and the transformation and impact of new knowledge.

What chance do academic researchers have of achieving such goals? What is
realistic?

In this paper I attempt to answer these questions from my own, personal perspective.
I start by considering the contextual origins of the Programme, then move to consider
some epistemological, substantive, theoretical, engagement and processual issues.

Where does the Programme come from? Context

A simple, technical answer to this question is that, in 1997, the funding council for
English universities decided that a special research programme on teaching and
learning in education would be valuable - and after a while commissioned ESRC to
manage it. Work began in 1999, and Phase I Networks were funded from 2000.
Other funders joined in, and the Programme grew and developed. It now boasts
three phases and is resourced until the end of 2008.

A more politically-aware answer would be that TLRP was a follow-through from the
enormous changes in public education that characterised the 1980s and 1990s. The
development by successive Conservative and New Labour governments in England
of national systems for curriculum, assessment, inspection, performance
management, teacher training, etc. was researched, analysed and critiqued by an
annoyingly independent academic community. And yet this ‘irritant’ was itself
fractured into a multiplicity of groups, tribes and territories and, when it could be
understood, was perceived to have an indulgent sense of the relationship between
evidence and argument, with value commitments often providing a bridge. A feeling
in high places that ‘something should be done’ was given added impetus by critics
such as Hargreaves, Tooley and Hillage. In this climate, TLRP was established.
Focused on the practical issue of pedagogy, framed by the structure of a Programme
and incorporating a strategy for improving methodological ‘rigour’, it was seen by
some in the academic world as a framework for challenge and control.

Those who subscribe to the ‘sociological imagination’ might perceive things in yet
another way. Social institutions emerge, ebb and flow at the interface of history and
biography, and both individual agency and the constraints of social structure are real.
We ‘make’ history, but not in conditions of our own choosing.

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