Much has been written about educational research and knowledge production in universities. Much has also been said about the lack of rigour or theoretical incoherence of educational research, or its failure to produce cumulative findings. What makes this book unique is the emphasis it places on the relationship between knowledge production and knowledge utilisation. This book is not about improving the educational research enterprise itself, but about mobilising its findings to improve educational practice.

That emphasis is much needed. Of course, the limited scope of educational research is in itself striking – on average, the industrialised world devotes roughly 15 times more of public budgets to health research than to educational research, even if both sectors use similar shares of public spending. But even more striking is the limited impact that the existing educational research has on professional practice – with research funding still heavily weighted towards doing rather than sharing and using research.

There is no question that education is a knowledge industry in that it is concerned with the transmission of knowledge; but it is still far from a knowledge industry in terms of its own practices being systematically transformed by knowledge about their efficacy. In many other fields, people enter their professional lives expecting their practice to be changed by research, but this is still less the case in education. There is, of course, a large body of research about learning but much of it is unrelated to the kind of real-life learning that is the focus of formal education. Even then, it has an insufficient impact when education continues as a cottage industry, with practitioners working in isolation and building their practice on folk wisdom. Central prescription of what teachers should do, which still dominates today's education systems, will not transform teachers’ practices in the way that professional engagement in the search for evidence of what makes a difference can.

While a knowledge-based teaching profession might have been a ‘nice to have’ in the past, it is a ‘must have’ now. When one could still assume that what students learn in school will last for their lifetime, the focus of practitioners could be on educational content and routine cognitive skills that are packaged in curriculum departments.