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Tracey Burns reports from the meeting of European Network of Education Councils (EUNEC) and Portuguese Conselho Nacional de Educaçäo held in Lisbon on 8-9 October 2007.
The purpose of the trip was to attend a meeting the European Network of Education Councils (EUNEC) and Portuguese Conselho Nacional de Educaçäo. The meeting had two main themes (divided by days): Evidence-Based Education Policy and Steps to Equity and Education. I spoke to the first of the themes and presented our recent publication: Evidence in Education: Linking Research and Policy
As Portugal is currently holding the Presidency of the EU, this meeting was a direct follow-up to the meeting on Evidence-based Policy Research held by the previous Presidency (Germany) in Frankfurt in March 2007. It was good to see this issue receiving continuing attention and discussion, particularly in countries such as Portugal which have not yet been active in our activities on this topic to date.
This meeting was timed to coincide with the publication of the EC Communication on Evidence-based Practice and Policy (developed in consultation with CERI), which carefully references and highlights the work of CERI/OECD in pushing the international agenda on this issue. The presentation of this work by the EC was done by David-Pascal Dion.
In addition to David-Pascal Dion other notable speakers were Rui Santos, a sociology professor from the University, who took an interesting and challenging position on the role of evidence in educational policy-making. He argued that the need to insist on rigorous research did not preclude or dictate any particular methodological approach but rather set up a conceptualisation of how different levels (national, regional, local) could interact with actors (government, researchers, teachers) in different phases of the policy cycle (diagnostic, modelling, monitoring) to create a holistic and dynamic interaction in research for policy purposes. It was interesting in the attempt it made to incorporate both the complexities of policy-making and the different types of research capacities in the system with a model for stakeholder intervention.
My presentation was well received and there was a thoughtful and interesting discussion afterwards (due in part to the capable chairing of the session by Mark Rickinson). The international audience was very well-versed and on top of the discussion, and provided a very teacher-oriented perspective (a welcome addition to what is often a government-researcher dominated debate).
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