Martyn Hammersley (TES, October 9) is right to comment that the recent survey of educational research that the Office for Standards in Education commissioned from James Tooley has “been generally criticised for exhibiting many of the methodological weaknesses it ascribes to others”.
As someone whose work was criticised by him, I would like to point out that before becoming a full-time researcher I was a teacher for 25 years. On that basis, I think I have a good sense of what is and is not valuable in educational research. Furthermore, all of my research has been conducted as a teacher or in collaboration with other teachers. My research has been completely misrepresented by the Ofsted report, and I suspect that many other educational researchers are in the same position.
Dr Geoff Troman is a research fellow at the Open University’s School of Education.
