Building research capacity: stories from a new university’s School of Education

We are three educational researchers working together in the School of Education at the University of Northampton. A University since 2005, Northampton comprises six Schools and 14,000 students and has embarked on a programme of major changes, asserting itself a leader in social enterprise and innovation and planning a new campus. Our School of Education has a good reputation for teaching but despite its current tally of 40 PhD students it is less renowned for research. In 2013, we three were seconded for a minimum of two years as the first substantive researchers at senior lecturer level within our School’s Centre for Education and Research, with Dr Cristina Devecchi since appointed an Associate Professor. In a volatile national context of rife marketization and increasingly scarce research funding in education, our core role is to build educational research capacity within our University. In this paper we relate our professional stories, reflecting on where we have come from, what we are doing as educational researchers in a highly dynamic space and where this might lead …