WISERD has successfully secured a £1m investment into the development of education research in Wales with the establishment of WISERDEDUCATION.
The Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) funded programme has the potential to change the landscape of education research in Wales and will put Wales at the forefront of research capacity building developments in the UK and beyond.
The four key elements of WISERDEDUCATION are research infrastructure enhancement, a series of research projects, researcher capacity building with university staff, and activities to improve the research literacy of educational practitioners and policy makers.
WISERDEDUCATION is an exciting and innovative model of how to build a sustainable research infrastructure. The project will build on WISERD’s existing networks, expertise and infrastructure to develop a unique combination of data integration and longitudinal studies to provide a resource for ongoing and sustainable increases in educational research activity.
The establishment of a series of prospective cohort and institution studies in different areas of Wales will be one of the most innovative and exciting aspects of the programme. The data from these studies will create a virtual laboratory for social science research which can be used to increase engagement and promote capacity building in a cost-effective way.
Another major feature of the programme will be to offer less experienced and novice researchers the real opportunity of working with more experienced education researchers, either within Wales or elsewhere. WISERDEDUCATION will seek to extend the skills of education researchers, particularly in the area of quantitative and mixed method approaches, by providing a framework for capacity building which emphasises the importance of actually doing research.
In addition, the enhanced research infrastructure will generate robust data for a series of research projects and provide a highly effective vehicle for developing new forms of collaborative activity, across the Welsh universities and more widely.
Professor Sally Power, the Co-Director of WISERD who will lead WISERDEDUCATION said: “This investment will place Wales at the forefront of educational research capacity building. WISERDEDUCATION will harness the impetus that has been developed through WISERD and use it to foster increased educational research activity in Wales.”
For more information about WISERDEDUCATION please visit the web page here or email wiserd@cardiff.ac.uk.