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Improving Research

The push for evidence-informed policy and practice in education has set a new agenda for education research. The quality and integrity of research evidence are more important than ever before as schools and policymakers are now encouraged to use research evidence in policy decisions and in the classroom. Such decisions can have important implications for the lives of millions of people in education. This is an important theme at DECE. We take the quality and trustworthiness of research very seriously. One of our aims is to improve the quality of research through robust evaluations of programmes used in schools, systematic reviews and meta-analysis and through constantly thinking of ways of improving the methods of research.

Recent relevant publications include

Siddiqui, N. and Gorard, S. (2022) 'Is household income a reliable measure when assessing educational outcomes? A Jigsaw of two datasets (Next Steps and National Pupil Database) for understanding indicators of disadvantage.'International Journal of Research & Method in Education .

Siddiqui, N., Boliver, V. and Gorard, S. (2019) Assessing the reliability of longitudinal social surveys of access to higher education: the case of the Next Steps survey in England, Social Inclusion, 7, 1.