Gary Husband has long held a passion for academic research. But as a college engineering lecturer, he found his opportunities were limited by his teaching commitments. “There was no time for any other activity in the working week, so I had to do research in my own time,” he recalls.

When he was promoted to head of the automotive engineering department at Edinburgh College, and then subsequently to head of professional development, the number of other tasks on Husband’s to-do list continued to grow.

Three years ago, Husband took the bold step of moving to higher education to become a lecturer in education at the University of Stirling. He now spends around two days a week on research - an opportunity unlikely to have come his way had he stayed in a college environment. “Many people in further education are interested in developing teaching practices and practice relating to wellbeing, and so on,” he says. “They are able to do small amounts of practice-based research, but there’s a frustration because they don’t have more time to do it - they have such a big teaching load and colleges don’t designate enough time to do it.”

If you work in education, it’s hard to avoid research. A drive to inform teaching practice with robust evidence has taken hold of the profession in recent years. Whereas academic tomes about teaching used to gather dust in university libraries, a new generation of enthused practitioners is bringing the research back into the classroom.

Events such as ResearchED have succeeded in making an interest in the practice behind pedagogy a mainstream preoccupation for teachers. And, owing to the investment in and focus from the Education Endowment Foundation, the results of large-scale randomised controlled trials are becoming more prevalent in classroom practice.

Yet, while research continues to spread through the country’s schools, it is proving much more difficult for it to take root in colleges and training providers. “Gaining research skills is particularly difficult for teachers within the diverse FE and skills sector,” notes a report by the Royal Society, published in October.

“The dual professionalism of many teachers (who identify first with the vocational specialism they originally trained in) means that they are frequently unengaged with educational research, and encouragement may be lacking, as many senior staff within the sector lack research experience.”

So, what are the main obstacles in the way of budding research practitioners working in FE? And what is being done to address the dearth of research activity?

Moves to make the sector more responsive to research are certainly afoot. More than 20 organisations involved in research have collaborated to form Networking the Networks. This month it launched a new website, networkingthenetworks.com, providing introductions and links to the groups and organisations concerned with research, and the use of evidence in the sector, and offering access tools and resources to help college lecturers become researchers in their own right.

Appetite for research

Andrew Morris, chair of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Education and co-organiser of the Learning and Skills Research Network (LSRN), is a member of the working group for the new project. The appetite for research exists among the younger generation of college teachers, he believes. “More and more teachers in colleges are joining the LSRN and they are setting up research groups around the country,” he adds.

Back in 1997, when the LSRN was formed (under its previous guise of the Further Education Research Network), people were asking, “Is there such a thing as research in FE?”, Morris says. “We now don’t need to ask that question anymore.”

One of the most visible teacher researchers on social media is Sam Jones, an initial teacher education lecturer at Bedford College. She founded FE research meets - informal events where like-minded teachers in the sector can meet to swap ideas. Jones also helped to create the Bedford College Group Research Network, the first of its kind in the sector.

She started her career teaching business studies, becoming an advanced practitioner before moving into the teacher education sphere. She first started researching six years ago when she undertook a master’s degree. The interest was sparked by a desire to explore some of the issues she saw in the sector around continuing professional development for vocational teachers.

“I felt it was something we did badly within the sector as a whole,” Jones says. “I wanted to change it because it was so poor, it wasn’t worth doing. I think there are more teachers in FE looking to do their own research. My guess is it has been a minority sport for quite some time. There is an appetite to share our findings between ourselves and for ourselves.”

FE research meets can be set up by any interested practitioners; six are currently planned for 2019. The aim of the growing movement is to make research in colleges the norm rather than the exception.

“Research gives me the opportunity to try things out within the college that I would not have been able to before,” Jones says. “As an advanced practitioner, I have a focus on research to try to normalise it in the college. When I work with other members of staff, I’m able to bring research to bear.

“I can be working with someone looking to improve their practice and can use some of the ideas around vocational knowledge and understanding that I have researched. It can be really great and brings a lot of satisfaction to my job. It can be very difficult, though, when I see the sector going the opposite way to the evidence base in the research.”

For Jones, research is about encouraging professionalism within the sector - and providing it with the tools and evidence to make its case to government for greater investment. “It comes back to the fact that if we keep shying away from complexity, we’re just going to keep getting knocked back.” At Bedford College, at least, the message is being heard: research has now been built into the college’s strategic plan.

Lack of leadership

Another champion of the research agenda is Ali Hadawi, principal of neighbouring Central Bedfordshire College. Hadawi, the only college principal on the advisory panel of the Association for Research in Post-Compulsory Education, believes a lack of leadership in this area is a key factor behind many of the problems the FE sector now faces. “There are two main issues,” he says. “The first is that we are not heard as a sector. The second is no one - in terms of senior civil servants and policymakers - understands us. They don’t come from the world of FE, but make decisions that we have to implement.

“If we just continue as a sector complaining that policymakers don’t understand us, then in 20 years’ time, nothing will have changed.

“One way to have a voice is to have evidence to base decisions around. This is what we need to do if we want to propose policy. We need to have the evidence to say, ‘This is what works’. It can’t just be my view or a college’s view.”

One reason Hadawi thinks colleges have not collaborated more on research is because, post-incorporation, colleges have been pitted against each other to compete for their own resources and interests.

“We talk about ourselves as ‘a sector’, but we do not operate as one,” he continues. “My view is that we were never really formed as a sector. When the government says ‘We want colleges to collaborate’, it is rubbish because the policy doesn’t want us to collaborate. So, we never saw research as our business, unlike universities.”

Hadawi says that college principals have been good at leading their own colleges but not the wider sector.

“Over the years, we have complained that people don’t listen or understand us, and that’s why [policymakers] come up with erroneous policy that doesn’t work. But we haven’t come up with an alternative ourselves that works. If we’re really serious about making change, then one way is to create an evidence base through research.”

One of the main obstacles to this has been that research has been carried out in a fragmented way, with little interaction and cooperation between individuals in different workplaces. “Partnership working is about different people working together in a team and doing different roles. This helps with engaging with a university or between colleges,” Morris says.

“It can be people working in FE deciding on the design of the project and the question it’s asking. Sometimes there is a need for collaborations between academics and some practitioners.”

Another knock-on effect of the reluctance by some colleges to collaborate with universities is that this has meant they have had little opportunity to tap into funding.

“It can be hard for colleges to get direct funding as some research fund-granting bodies - like the Economic and Social Research Council - do not recognise colleges as research institutions,” says Morris.

Universities, therefore, have a head start when applying for research grants, as they can demonstrate proven expertise in a relevant field, especially in the social sciences, according to Husband.

“[Big research funders] will give money to universities on the understanding that there are individuals who have expertise to conduct the research. That’s not to say people in colleges don’t have the expertise. But, largely speaking, they will be unsuccessful in bidding for money.”

And Husband raises another obstacle: whereas universities routinely subscribe to academic journals, this is not the case for colleges. As a result, college-based staff are often unable to access vital research materials. “We need to encourage college libraries to start to access the journals where stuff is published,” he says.

Only by coaxing colleges and universities to work more closely together can a more conducive environment be created, Husband adds. “My call to arms is for higher education students and researchers interested in education and social justice to partner with colleges to look at what needs to be researched - but first, ask the colleges what they think, and work in partnership with them.”

George Ryan is an FE reporter for Tes. He tweets @GeorgeMRyan