Administrators as Researchers — Collaboration in the Scottish Regions

Abstract

The optimistic assumption that research can be legitimised as a necesary aid to rational policy-making has been painfully reappraised in the light of experience over the last fifteen years. It now seems that more information may make decisions harder to make, not easier; that improved information, by calling conventional wisdom into question, may be seen as a threat to the functioning of systems; and that scientifically respectable information may be too trivial or too general to meet the specific problems of administrators. Yet one of the assumptions of the Collaborative Research Programme mounted by the Centre for Educational Sociology at Edinburgh University* is that research can be useful to the policy-maker. Although this paper concentrates upon Regional administrators, the main thrust of the Programme is to encourage an active relationship to research on the part of practitioners of all kinds in the Scottish education system. It was envisaged that they would contribute to the formation and continuation of an extensive data-base on Scottish school leavers, to which they will have ready access by computer in order to conduct their own research. This may enable them, and indeed any educationist, to look at Scottish education in ways which the existing information resources did not facilitate, to achieve new understandings of the educational and social processes which their decisions are affecting, and to validate or query the public account of the Scottish education system. Through collaboration with the Programme, they can become researchers themselves, where previously that role may have seemed neither necessary, nor possible, nor legitirrate to people involved in the day-to-day provision of an education service. The resource that the Programme is creating is designed to change educationists' understandings of the relationship of research to decision-making by making research a serious proposition for them, and not just something to be thought of as the province of academics whose products are rarely relevant to the particular concerns of practitioners. Even if decision-makers think about other, more desirable, models of this relationship, they are normally not in a position to bring them about on their own. One obstacle is that the amount and type of statistical information that is available to the Regions through central and local sources is insufficient, and, where available, is not easily turned to the purpose of undertaking broad or deep research on important educational issues, since that information is gathered and disseminated for specific administrative purposes and thus only embodies the concepts and categories of the official public function to which it relates. The wider aims of Collaborative Research are to encourage a changed attitude to such data as is already available to decisionmakers, so that they may find an untapped research potential in it. The Programme's data-base will provide some of the same information, but in a richer, more flexible, and more disaggregated form to suit the potential needs of a wide variety of users in geographically or structurally local contexts. The data-base will also provide rriuch additional information not available elsewhere. In what is a highly centralised education system, the data and the research attitude we are seeking to foster will enable local users to initiate and carry out a formidable range of enquiries into existing practices, patterns, and outcomes, and will enable hypothetical alternative education policies and concepts to be tested.