The push by the chief inspector of schools to limit educational research to work of direct relevance to teacher training and government policy threatens to undermine the development of new perspectives on education, according to Dave Phoenix of the University of Central Lancashire. In an editorial for the Journal of Biological Education, Dr Phoenix rejects the claim by Chris Woodhead (above) that educational research "amounted to little more than biased and irrelevant dross". But he concedes that bias does creep into a number of papers:
"usually because the size of the sample is insufficient to make widespread claims". He argues that these papers are still valuable and that research funding should be made more accessible to all educators, not just specialist researchers to broaden debate.