International perspectives on research capacity building

This edition of the British Journal of Educational Studies focuses on building research capacity in education, a topic which has been of particular concern over the last decade. The special issue shares UK and international experiences. Research in education has always been difficult because of the intrinsic complexity of the phenomena and issues. For the long-term and progressive development of the field, capacity building is thus something which has to be taken extremely seriously. The largest-ever UK capacity building initiative was the Teaching and Learning Research Project (TLRP) (www.tlrp.org), which embodied a major investment in educational research and had a clear remit to build research capacity and to engage research users across the education sector. TLRP’s strategies evolved from 1999 to 2009 as capacity building issues became progressively better understood and in response to needs and commitments within the field. Thus, moving beyond an initial survey (McIntyre and McIntyre, 1999), three main stages may be identified. The first of these from 2002 to 2005 was training, when the Programme’s Research Capacity Building Network provided cross-Programme training services in the research methods which were felt to be particularly appropriate for the study of teaching and learning. The second stage from 2005 is characterised as social practices, when explicit attempts began to be made to embed processes for the development of research expertise within the social practices of educational researchers. This was seen as a complement to the provision of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) through its National Centre for Research Methods and Research Methods Programme. Additionally, close working relationships were established with the Applied Research in Education Scheme (AERS) in Scotland and, for sustainability purposes, with relevant UK learned societies such as the British Educational Research Association (BERA). This strategy was evaluated through the Mapping the Ripples project (Fowler and Procter, 2008). In the third stage from 2007, particular effort was directed towards the development of on-line capacity building materials and resources to be available to the field as part of the TLRP legacy. Structured by ESRC’s research training requirements, UK experts were commissioned to provide ‘walk through’ guidance on topics and issues that have an explicit capacity building dimension. These were originally developed on the TLRP website