Two new education research centres will receive £6 million under plans to invest more funding into UK university departments shunned by previous governments.
In a significant policy shift the Department for Education (DfE) has announced it will fund a new research centre to examine how children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) can be identified earlier and how pupils can be supported with their mental health. It will involve researchers from nine universities including UCL, Birkbeck, Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol, with a remit to “provide ministers and officials with rapid, reliable evidence when they need it most”.
A second centre, the Educational Economics Research Centre, will consider the economic and social benefits of education. Led by UCL alongside the London School of Economics and Institute for Fiscal Studies, it will build new tools to assess the long-term social and economic value of education policy, including for children from disadvantaged groups.
While the £6 million multiyear funding commitment is a large sum for education research (faculties received just £5.1 million from the Economic and Social Research Council in 2024, a recent report by the British Educational Research Association found), the DfE’s decision to directly fund education research within universities has been seen as more significant.
