Who Really Cares about Using Education Research in Policy and Practice?

12. Building a culture of research engagement: What are the success factors?

Nóra Révai
OECD

Melissa Mouthaan
OECD

Abstract

This chapter brings together the lessons learnt from the chapters in this report. It starts by elaborating on the ingredients and basic enabling conditions of thoughtful engagement with research. It then discusses insights on learning both as a core component of a strong research engagement culture and as an explicit capacity-building strategy. The chapter summarises structures, processes and tools that bridge the research-policy-practice gap and discusses implications for leadership. It concludes with thoughts about the future of research engagement and suggests concrete actions.

Introduction

Building a strong culture of research use in policy and practice means developing beliefs, values, norms and attitudes that consider research evidence a major source of knowledge for decision making at all levels of the education system. This is by no means an easy task, and it demands a collaborative and self‑reflective effort from researchers, policy makers, practitioners, intermediaries and other actors. This report set out to examine how we can develop a culture of research engagement and what learning it involves for individuals, organisations and the system. The initial questions that guided this report were:

• What do we mean by a culture that supports research engagement? What are the characteristics of such a culture and how can we develop these in educational organisations and at the system level?

• How can we develop individuals’ and teams’ skills and organisational and systemic capacity for a quality use of research in policy making and practice?

• Which structures and processes support the development (or transformation) of an organisational and system-level culture for better research engagement?

Chapter 1 of this report pointed to the heterogeneity of culture(s) within and across organisations and systems. It raised the conceptual question of whether culture is the inherent nature of organisations and systems or an attribute we can transform. The chapters in this report suggest that there are some key factors that influence the culture of research engagement in policy and practice, and these factors can be actively shaped and supported. Authors gave insights into what key ingredients are still lacking in systems and how we can better align and co-ordinate mechanisms. Importantly, they also gave numerous examples of existing initiatives, tools and practices which have been shown to support engagement with research. This chapter highlights the main messages that have emerged.

Understanding and enabling thoughtful engagement with research

The foundation of a culture of research engagement is developing a shared and deep understanding of what research evidence and “thoughtful engagement” with it mean – to use the term Mark Rickinson and colleagues introduced (Rickinson et al., 2022[1]). Yet, this shared understanding is simply missing in more than half of the systems that responded to the OECD survey (see Chapter 3).

Research evidence remains just one source of knowledge that competes with the contextual and professional knowledge of different actors and the interests and views of a range of stakeholder groups. The two evidence use journeys portrayed by Rien Rouw and Quirine van der Hoeven (Chapter 4) and Jeroen Backs and colleagues (Chapter 5), as well as John O’Connor’s case study of the research-policy interface in Ireland (Chapter 11), demonstrate the complexity of using research in a policy process through the authentic voices of policy officials. In addition to complexity caused by different sources of knowledge and views, research itself originates from different disciplines (e.g. curriculum research, policy evaluations, foresight research) and contexts (local, national, international) and thus needs to be translated or interpreted when applied to another context. Research sometimes presents conflicting findings, or implications for policy or practice are not clearly defined. Ultimately, political values and the political agenda play a major role in policy decisions. These factors altogether show that an instrumental use of research, i.e. direct implementation of evidence, is hardly ever possible for complex policy questions.

Similarly, Toby Greany and Georgina Hudson (Chapter 11) point to the difficulty of instrumental evidence use, even when robust evidence and implementation guides, such as the Education Endowment Foundation’s resources, are available. School leaders and teachers also face strategic choices and operational dilemmas that require thoughtful engagement with research rather than its straightforward application.

These challenges together do not invalidate the legitimacy of strengthening research engagement. Rather, they call for developing thoughtful engagement with research by all stakeholders involved in policy and practice decisions. The strength of decision-making processes lies in the meaningful combination of different knowledge sources, values and agendas, with research evidence playing an important role in determining the trajectory of policies and practices.

Ingredients of thoughtful engagement with research

A key piece in thoughtful engagement with research is genuine motivation and willingness to challenge one’s views based on research. OECD survey data presented in Chapter 3 show that while motivation is strong overall, ministries in half of the respondent systems think that practitioners and policy makers are unwilling to question their opinions. Challenging one’s own views and preconceptions is more difficult than ever before in our narcissistic western societies so strongly centred on our projected image (Revel and Ricard, 1997[2]). It requires authentic self-reflection and courage to investigate our thoughts and actions deeply, acknowledge when we are wrong and identify areas for improvement, and recognise when ideas are based on ideology. In this respect, the self-reflective analysis of the evidence use journeys presented in Chapters 4 and 5 are notable demonstrations of thoughtful engagement with research at the system level.

Genuine curiosity, or an “inquiry habit of mind”, as Chris Brown and Cindy Poortman (Chapter 8) describe it, is another key element. It involves seeking out a range of perspectives, relevant information from numerous and diverse sources, interpreting and challenging these, and exploring new ways to resolve problems. The same chapter stresses the role of emotions in being open, curious and willing to challenge our own preconceptions.

An emotional state that drives exploration and creativity will only develop in a trusting environment. Trust allows people to open up, be vulnerable, share difficulties, propose innovative ideas and take risks (Cerna, 2014[3]), as underlined across almost all chapters in this report. Yet, trust in research itself and trust between researchers and policy makers/practitioners are both generally weak across OECD systems (Chapter 3).

Basic enabling conditions

Facilitating a culture of engagement with research requires enabling conditions and incentives for thoughtful engagement among all actors. Various chapters across this report discuss these conditions.

It is by now well-established and often observed that a fundamental condition for research engagement is time. A lack of time has been and still is perceived as a shared barrier to engaging with research in policy and practice across systems (OECD, 2022[4]). As Elizabeth Farley-Ripple and co-authors highlight in Chapter 10, in schools with a strong research engagement culture (“deep-use” schools), using research is not additional work, it is part of “the work”. Inger-Sophie Berge Hurlen and Jørn Pedersen (Chapter 11) describe how a municipality creates space and time for developing and sustaining relationships between school leaders, universities and local policy makers. Allocating time for something is giving it importance. Systems and leaders within them have a duty to ensure that research engagement does not become yet another item that falls onto teachers or civil servants to incorporate in their already busy workloads.

Developing trust and a shared understanding requires stable relationships and quality interactions between stakeholders, which is the third condition. This involves regularly identifying key actors and strategically investing in their interactions. Partnerships work best when power is shared among the different participants and when there are clear expectations regarding roles and the purpose of the partnership. These elements can be supported by structured dialogues in which research evidence can be collectively appraised and other types of knowledge, as well as values, taken into account. The learning conversations presented in Chapter 8, the arts-based approaches discussed by Amanda Cooper and colleagues in Chapter 9, and the collective evidence appraisal in deliberative decision making briefly described in Chapter 6 are all concrete tools that support quality interactions.

Giving importance to research engagement is also reflected in systemic incentives. Chapter 3 notes that using research is important to policy makers and practitioners in most of the systems, but in about a quarter of them, there is no clear expectation to use education research. While setting expectations to use research is acknowledging its importance. Chapter 8 reminds us that using research for accountability rather than a genuine commitment to improving, will likely not result in thoughtful engagement. Building and sustaining quality relationships necessitates not only dedicated time but also stable funding, as demonstrated in the Stavanger, Norway case study in Chapter 11.

This report suggests that there is considerable scope to establish strong incentives for research engagement in organisations and systems, with system leaders playing a key role in establishing these incentives.

Connecting research generation and research engagement

There is no thoughtful engagement with research without appropriate research in the first place. From the perspective of research engagement, there are two aspects of quality: the quality of research evidence itself and the quality of engagement with it (OECD, 2022[4]; Rickinson, Sharples and Lovell, 2020[5]). The quality of research in this context goes beyond methodological quality and includes its relevance and accessibility as well. Melissa Mouthaan and Mykolas Steponavičius show in Chapter 2 that OECD systems consider various types of research relevant for policy, but some of these are not yet highly accessible. They argue that well-designed mechanisms to co-ordinate the production of education research could help address gaps in research and issues around accessibility. Synthesising evidence is one such mechanism that is still lacking in education despite wide recognition of its importance in reinforcing research engagement. All policy pieces (featured in Chapters 4, 5 and 11) emphasise that more high-quality evidence syntheses could strongly support research engagement in policy making.

Involving practitioners and policy makers in research has been proposed by many as a way to make research more relevant and strengthen engagement with it (OECD, 2022[4]). But alongside the promises of collaborative research, critical voices remain, particularly about the scientific rigour, feasibility and value of such research (Kieser and Leiner, 2011[6]; Oliver, Kothari and Mays, 2019[7]). Innovative approaches to collaborative research engagement are emerging using arts and games as a means to bring different actors together, create a shared language and mutual understanding (see Chapter 9). Another actionable approach detailed in this report is that of learning conversations that can be used in data teams and research learning networks (Chapter 8). Action research was used to evaluate interventions in schools in the England case study in Chapter 11. The analyses of evidence use journeys could be described as policy action research and in Chapter 6, Nóra Révai argued that they are valuable for improving policy and have the potential to enrich research itself.

Most of the examples of collaborative, practitioner or policy research featured in this report are not quite like research production in its traditional, academic sense. Perhaps the main criticism of these less traditional forms of research could be alleviated if we considered them as research engagement rather than research production. If their goal is school and policy improvement and if this goal is achieved, their value is hardly questionable. The examples in this publication suggest that collaborative research is something in between research production, mobilisation and use. Certainly, as Chapter 2 emphasises, more research is needed to explore their forms, impact and value for research generation and engagement.

Overall, many chapters suggest that developing a culture of research engagement would require better connections between research generation, mobilisation and engagement processes. Only a handful of countries have a national strategy for education research that encompasses all these pieces. Norway is a good example that recently revised its education research strategy and expanded its scope to include a stronger focus on research dissemination and user participation (Chapter 7). Such strategies, as well as other system-level co-ordination mechanisms, would also be needed to strengthen the link between generation, mobilisation and engagement.

Learning as culture and strategy

Professional learning is a core building block of a strong research use culture. So much so that we wonder if learning is not part of the culture. Chapters across this report showed two angles of learning in the context of research engagement: learning as an attribute of a research engagement culture and learning as a strategy to develop a research engagement culture.

Under the first angle, a learning-centred attitude is a descriptor of an organisational or system-level culture. Chapter 8 identifies a norm of innovation and adoption as a success factor of learning conversations, a process that facilitates engagement with research and data to address problems. The authors associate the concept of learning organisation with this norm. Learning organisations have been described as:

… an organizational culture in which individual development is a priority, outmoded and erroneous ways of thinking are actively identified and corrected, and the purpose and vision of the organization are clearly understood and supported by all its members. (Worrell, 1995, p. 352[8])

The OECD identifies a culture of inquiry, exploration and innovation as one dimension of learning organisations (OECD, 2016[9]). This is to say that learning, innovation and research engagement are intimately associated from the perspective of organisational culture. In Chapter 11, research engagement is termed as “evidence-informed learning and improvement” in the England case study, which emphasises collective sensemaking and learning as key attributes of leadership that support this. Similarly, a culture of improvement is a feature of schools that are “deep users” of research, and Elizabeth Farley-Ripple and colleagues (Chapter 10) identify a strong focus on professional learning by leaders as key to developing this culture.

Under the second angle, learning as a strategy involves deliberately developing individual skills and collective capacity for research engagement in policy and practice-oriented organisations. Two components of this strategy emerge from this report. The first is setting expectations and standards with respect to developing research engagement skills. In Chapter 11, Huw Morris examines how changes to the standards in the policy profession have strengthened the expectation that civil servants in Wales integrate research evidence and use evaluation throughout the policy implementation process. The Dutch and Flemish evidence use journeys both suggest that the civil service competence framework recently developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (Schwendinger, Topp and Kovacs, 2022[10]) could be a useful tool for capacity development in ministries.

The second is developing practitioners’ and policy makers’ research-related skills. Chapter 3 points to serious gaps in this regard: the research literacy skills of practitioners and policy makers are not yet omnipresent across OECD systems, and teachers do not have sufficient opportunities to develop these in initial teacher education and continuous professional development. Chapter 4 proposes comprehensive human resource strategies for a ministry to ensure appropriate research-related capacity in policy processes. Such strategies can include recruitment, professional development for staff, and schemes such as secondments or public PhD programmes.

In organisations and systems with strong research engagement, learning as a norm (and as such part of the culture) and learning as a strategy are hardly separable. The Norway (Stavanger) municipality case study in Chapter 11 demonstrates how system-level expectations with respect to professional learning, a research-focused culture at the municipality and the municipality’s specific initiatives of collective learning among schools play out jointly to foster a culture of research engagement. Similarly, the learning conversations discussed in Chapter 8 and schools that are deep users of research (Chapter 10) incorporate a cultural and a strategic aspect of learning.  In these promising examples, learning is both a cultural norm of improvement and innovation, and a strategy with deliberate initiatives focused on professional learning for teachers to hone their research engagement skills.

This report focused primarily on practitioners’ and policy makers’ skills, thus fewer chapters addressed the question of learning for other actors, notably researchers and intermediaries. Yet, their skills and capacity are also critical to strengthen the impact of education research in policy and practice. Sufficient capacity for conducting policy-oriented research and synthesising research evidence to support policy making were highlighted as key in the Flemish evidence use journey (Chapter 5), and the case studies on Ireland and Wales (Chapter 11). Despite efforts in some countries, academic incentives are still a major barrier to conducting, synthesising and communicating, and possibly co-producing policy- and practice-relevant research (Chapters 2 and 11). Incentives should encourage researchers to develop their understanding of the nature, questions, problems and context of policy making, schools and teaching practice. In addition, leaders of schools, policy and research organisations play a key role in reinforcing research engagement and should have adequate opportunities to learn how to do this effectively. Future work should explore the extent and quality of learning opportunities for actors beyond practitioners and policy makers.

In sum, several of the contributions in this report show that education policy makers and practitioners in some systems demonstrate a reasonable – and at times quite advanced – understanding of research and its role (including limitations in what research can do). They also demonstrate competences to engage with research to solve challenges. While there is still a need to extend teachers’ and policy makers’ opportunities and systemic and organisational incentives to learn to engage with research thoughtfully, there are promising developments in this area, and ample room for mutual learning across countries and the policy and practice contexts.

Structures, processes and tools to bridge research, policy and practice

As noted in Chapter 1, there are significant communication and culture gaps between research, policy and practice communities. This report showcased numerous structures and processes that help bridge research, policy and practice and increase research engagement, along with concrete tools and strategies that support these. Structures, processes, tools and strategies are not hard and firm categories and sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between them. Structures roughly refer to the arrangement or organisation of something, while processes to a series of steps taken to achieve an outcome. Tools can be methodologies and artefacts that support processes, and strategies can refer to projects or sets of activities that sometimes combine structures and processes. This section uses these somewhat overlapping categories as a pragmatic way to present emerging findings from the report.

Structures and systems thinking

This report presented multiple types of structures, as summarised in Table 12.1. First, formal organisations that have the specific goal of closing the research-policy or research-practice gap. These organisations usually reflect long-term investments to establish stable structures. Second, informal networks and organisations that are shorter term structures set up to address specific issues. A third and perhaps less tangible type of structure are schemes that bring researchers and policy makers or practitioners closer to each other. These include secondments, fellowship arrangements and other structured mobility programmes for researchers and policy specialists to spend extended periods of time in each other’s organisations to better grasp the day-to-day realities of each other’s communities. The proximity of different actors was highlighted as an important factor in increasing research engagement in policy in the Wales and Ireland case studies (Chapter 11). There is growing evidence that such schemes drive the professional development of both educational researchers and policy makers (Chapter 11).

Table 12.1. Typology of structures showcased in this publication that support research engagement

Structure	Examples	Source in this report
Formal organisation	Public Policy Institute for Wales (United Kingdom) Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (Netherlands) Education Endowment Foundation (United Kingdom) Norwegian Knowledge Centre (Norway)	Chapters 4, 7 and 11
Informal networks and organisations	Research learning networks Network for Evidence-Informed Policy and Practice (Canada) Educational networks (Chile)	Chapters 8, 9 and 11
Schemes to promote proximity, mutual learning and interactions between the research, policy and practice communities	Secondments and policy fellowships Structured mobility programmes	Chapters 7 and 11

Note: This list is non-exhaustive.

This report showed that each of these types of structures can support research engagement and thereby improve policies and practices. However, what also emerges is a need for a system-level understanding of the landscape of these structures, their respective roles and impact. This would allow mapping missing links, and addressing needs through overall co-ordination mechanisms across these structures (Maxwell, Sharples and Coldwell, 2022[11]). The concept of knowledge infrastructure used in the Dutch evidence use journey (Chapter 4) reflects precisely this systems view. The analysis of the different actors and their roles in the curriculum revision process helped understand the dynamics of knowledge use over time and across the different stages of a policy process and led to valuable insights with respect to improving research engagement. Such analysis is a wonderful example of turning the abstract concept of systems thinking into a very concrete, actionable exercise.

Processes

In addition to structures, this report also presented a range of processes specifically designed to strengthen thoughtful engagement with research.

A wide range of processes exists in the context of practice. Chapter 8 describes the process of learning conversations with concrete guidance on the phases and activities, as well as the success factors. Engagement with data and research is at the core of this collaborative learning and school improvement process. Chapter 9 features approaches that support research-practice partnerships in ensuring that the basic ingredients and enabling conditions of thoughtful engagement discussed above – time, trust, quality interactions, curiosity. The collaborative inquiry networks presented by Mauricio Pino-Yancovic in Chapter 11 and the Norway (Stavanger) and England case studies in the same chapter also describe processes that facilitate research engagement in schools.

Processes that support policy makers’ engagement with research include research-policy-practice partnerships discussed in Chapter 9 and processes that facilitate stakeholders’ engagement with evidence in policy processes. Examples of the latter are the collective evidence appraisal by stakeholders (Chapter 6) and the stakeholder user groups introduced during the development of standardised tests in Flanders (Chapter 5). Through these user groups, teachers, school leaders, teacher trainers and other educators meet with researchers to discuss research proposals and provide input based on their own professional knowledge.

Tools and strategies

There are concrete tools and strategies that can support the effective functioning of these structures and processes. These include tools and strategies to develop policy makers’, practitioners’ and researchers’ skills; and to bring together stakeholders for evidence-informed learning or discussions. Many of these have been tested or trialled in one or more contexts. They often include clearly described stages and activities, and reflections from designers of these tools and their users, on contexts in which they can be applied as well as current limitations. As Table 12.2 shows, evidence of the impact of any such tool or approach is often still limited. But in many cases, evidence of positive impact and effectiveness is emerging. Some, such as Amanda Cooper and colleagues (Chapter 9) also emphasise the difficulty of determining the impact of some approaches and call for developing a broader understanding of impact that goes beyond traditional metrics and indicators.

Table 12.2. Tools showcased in this report that can support a culture of thoughtful engagement with evidence

Tool/programme/strategy	Purpose/description	Context	Evidence on effectiveness/ impact	Source in the report
Competence framework for policy makers and researchers (Joint Research Centre)	To inform human resource strategies: recruitment, skills and capacity development in policy and research organisations.	Policy/research	No (pilots in progress)	Chapter 3; Box 3.2
Nesta programmes for research engagement	Learning or training programmes for policy makers to develop skills and knowledge to engage with research.	Policy	Yes	Box 3.3
New Zealand Policy Project	Frameworks and repository of policy development methods to support policy making.	Policy	No	Box 3.3
Quality Use of Research framework	Framework that defines and elaborates what “quality use of education” means and its individual, organisational and systemic enablers. It can be used for self-reflection and collective professional learning in schools. The framework has accompanying support tools.	Practice (in this report applied for policy)	Emerging	Chapter 4
OECD Strategic Education Governance framework	A normative framework that defines six elements of effective governance. Designed to help countries meet modern education governance challenges.	Policy	No	Chapter 5
Collective evidence appraisal by stakeholders	A group of approaches used primarily in the healthcare sector that aim to structure stakeholder conversations around the best available evidence. Intended to inform policy making in a controlled way on a pre‑determined topic.	Policy	Yes	Chapter 6; Box 6.1
Norway Strategy for Educational Research	To raise the quality and scope of education research in selected areas; to promote user participation and practice-oriented issues in research; to stimulate method and theory development.	Policy/research	Yes	Chapter 7; Box 7.1
Norway Public Sector PhD Scheme	To expand research activities in public sector bodies, increase researcher recruitment within the public sector and to promote greater collaboration between academia and the public sector.	Policy/research	Emerging	Chapter 7
Learning conversations	A form of professional learning for practitioners that involves identifying and defining a specific problem and engaging with research, data and other forms of evidence to design and evaluate an approach/practice to overcome the problem.	Practice	Emerging	Chapter 8
Arts-based approaches to research co-production and knowledge mobilisation	Use of a wide range of arts-based activities (e.g. visual arts) at different stages of the research process as a mechanism to improve research engagement among participants.	Practice/research	Emerging	Chapter 9
The virtuous diamond framework of “deep users” of research	Framework outlining four organisational and interconnected dimensions (culture, structure, leadership and processes) that promote deep use of research in schools.	Practice	Emerging	Chapter 10
Policy Profession Standards in the United Kingdom	Professional standards for civil servants defining the range of skills expected at different levels. Arranged under three pillars.	Policy	No	Chapter 11, Figure 11.2
Collaborative Inquiry Network methodology	Support teachers in collectively addressing a practice-based challenge through inquiry and engagement with data and research.	Practice	Emerging	Chapter 11, Figure 11.3

Note: This list is non-exhaustive.

The richness of structures, processes, and supporting tools and approaches implemented with promising results in systems shows the progress made in closing the gaps between research, policy and practice. These tools, frameworks and approaches should be better leveraged. Often, innovation in such tools has not translated into wider testing or uptake in or across systems, suggesting there is scope for peer learning among countries and actors. An important next step would be to identify how systems can be supported in trialling these in their contexts. Ultimately, trialling novel tools should be accompanied by rigorous evaluation that will allow further insights into impact and effectiveness, including transferability across different contexts.

Leadership for research engagement

Leadership is key in role modelling behaviours, enabling the necessary conditions and forging connections for research engagement. Remarkably, only a minority of ministries reported that school leadership is supportive of research use (Chapter 3). This report shed light on the role of leadership in driving a culture of research engagement within and across organisations, but also crucially, at the system level. As the England case study in Chapter 11 noted, evidence-informed learning and school improvement at scale require sophisticated forms of system and network leadership. Across chapters, there is insight into what strong leadership in a policy or practice organisation might look like and how leaders can organise to promote research engagement. Chapter 11 explored the theme of leadership in depth through five case studies drawn from different national contexts.

Leaders as drivers of research engagement and innovation

A culture of research engagement and learning is connected to a culture of innovation and willingness to test new practices or approaches that stem from research evidence. Leadership plays a crucial role in ensuring that individuals in policy or practice organisations feel able to experiment with new approaches. Civil servants can perceive uncertainty as an obstacle to the development and agreement of policy proposals, but technical rationality in bureaucratic organisations can be an inappropriate response to problems that are ill-structured, messy or wicked (Sedlacko, 2016[12]). High levels of trust and strong signals from leaders that innovation is encouraged can help build a strong culture of research engagement, as underlined in most chapters of this report. In Chapter 11, the example given in the Norwegian municipality case study illustrates this very well. In this case, local governance actors in the Stavanger municipality of Norway work together in highly collaborative ways to promote research engagement among practitioners, and schools are actively encouraged to work together to strive for system-level improvement, thus also focusing on collaborating rather than competing. Leaders need to make sure that innovation processes systematically engage with research, and that any resulting experimentation is accompanied by evaluation to the extent possible. Good leadership drives research and innovation processes towards systematic improvement and establishing a culture of research engagement within an organisation or system.

Leaders as role models

It is also clear that leaders can model what “thoughtful engagement” with research looks like. This involves taking time for professional development to build the necessary skills for research engagement but also demonstrating that working thoughtfully with evidence can be highly nuanced and is rarely straightforward. In the England case study (Chapter 11), the authors draw on the concept of sensemaking (Weick, 1995[13]) that emerged from organisational studies: leaders make sense of complex environments as an ongoing process and through their interactions with this environment. As such, they develop their own knowledge of what thoughtful engagement with research entails and are able to share this knowledge with other practitioners. Chapter 10 describes how school leaders are responsible for setting a vision for evidence‑informed improvement, demonstrating their availability and openness to staff, and modelling vulnerability by being candid about their own learning and development trajectories.

Leadership and systems thinking

One of the ambitions of this report has been to bring to life the concept of a “systems approach” by providing concrete insights into what it might entail. Chapters across the report demonstrated the mutual influences between organisational and system-level cultures. Making this link a virtuous, rather than a vicious, circle requires coherent leadership across the different levels with a shared vision and a focus on research engagement.

System leadership at the national level emerged as critical to ensuring the conditions for thoughtful engagement with research in policy and practice. Systemic factors, such as a competitive school context, a strong focus on accountability to the detriment of innovation, and inappropriate expectations and incentives at the system level act as obstacles to all efforts to enhance research engagement. Chapter 8 and the case studies on England and Chile in Chapter 11 demonstrate this very clearly. Conversely, a system‑level vision with sufficient resources, incentives and opportunities can strongly reinforce research use in schools and policy organisations, as shown in the Norway (Stavanger) and Wales case studies (Chapter 11), for example.

Chapter 11’s conclusion points to the importance of creating coherence across the different levels of leadership. School leaders can be more effective in building a culture of research engagement in their schools when the appropriate conditions are ensured by local and national-level leadership. In decentralised systems, local government leaders such as municipalities, play a key role in capitalising on national policies and translating them into appropriate local conditions. They can also advocate for appropriate conditions when these are not yet in place at the national level. School network system leaders also navigate the conditions and constraints that are ultimately defined elsewhere in the system in an effort to make the best out of the given possibilities.

In sum, while individual elements of leadership (e.g. leadership in schools, networks and local policy authorities) can be promising, a research-engaged culture benefits strongly from coherence across the different levels. A systems approach in practice, therefore, requires strong connections between leadership at different levels.

The future of research generation, mobilisation and engagement

This report explored how education systems can develop a culture of research engagement in practice and policy organisations and at the level of the system. While major gaps remain with respect to ensuring key conditions for research engagement, including allocating resources, introducing appropriate incentives and providing suitable learning opportunities for all actors, there are also promising developments. The report showcased numerous examples of structures, processes and concrete tools that support research engagement at various levels.

The first report of the OECD Strengthening the Impact of Education Research project presented cutting‑edge research on knowledge mobilisation. It called for more research in this field to better understand which structures, processes and practices are effective and how we can support countries and organisations in implementing them (OECD, 2022[4]). Gaps in our knowledge about strengthening research generation, mobilisation and engagement undoubtedly still exist, and this report indicated a few. In particular, this report focused less on the culture, learning and leadership of research and intermediary organisations. While the amount of knowledge and resources available in this field has been steadily growing, an important next step would be to better leverage this knowledge.

A key starting point would be to adapt, trial and evaluate the practices that have shown to be promising. With respect to leveraging knowledge, the call for more and better evidence syntheses also holds for the field of knowledge mobilisation. Systematic reviews and a structured repository of evidence in this field could help countries and actors engage with this research and improve the culture of research engagement in an evidence-informed way. It could also help researchers to identify knowledge gaps more clearly and co-ordinate efforts to address them.

With respect to existing practices, it would be desirable to inventory them – including structures, processes, tools and strategies – and categorise them in terms of their purpose and context, and regularly update information on how they have been used and what results they have produced. Notably, adapting and testing these across country contexts and sectors – education has a lot to learn from health and other sectors (OECD, 2022[4]) – could help further build the knowledge base. We have also seen promising examples of using tools developed for practice in the policy context and vice versa.

However, we must emphasise – based on robust evidence – that a research repository and an inventory of practices will not be sufficient to mobilise this knowledge. A systems approach will involve building relationships internationally and enabling quality interactions and peer learning among actors who wish to build a stronger culture of research engagement in education. The project’s two learning seminars demonstrated the potential of such interactions and mutual learning among policy makers for facilitating system change. Generating quality interactions and learning is also needed among intermediary actors that, in many systems, are weaving the connecting tissue between research, policy and practice. There have been increasingly more initiatives in this direction in recent years (e.g. Transforming Evidence Network, the Education Endowment Foundation’s Global Partnership, the European Commission’s Learning Lab and more). According to this report, a systems approach would involve mapping and supporting these initiatives, and engaging them in collective learning and knowledge building.

Finally, we would like to remind the readers that the goal of strengthening research generation, mobilisation and engagement is to improve education systems and ultimately student learning. To ascertain that we are achieving this goal, we need to collectively make a stronger effort to measure and systematically monitor the impact of initiatives. This is a challenging endeavour given the multitude of factors interacting in complex education systems. A better understanding of the impact of knowledge mobilisation activities of intermediary organisations (Torres and Steponavičius, 2022[14]) will be the OECD Strengthening the Impact of Education Research project’s next step in this direction.

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