Researching and learning together: inter-institutional collaboration as strategy for capacity building

Introduction There is growing awareness of trends in educational research capacity that give cause for concern: the increasingly elderly demographic of education researchers (Mills et al., 2006), the increasing concentration of education funding and research in a small number of research intensive institutions (Pollard,2008), and the possibility that education training might become divorced from its research base. All of these concerns are rapidly becoming manifest in Wales, and it was for this reason that the Welsh Education Research Network (WERN) was formed in order to increase educational research capacity across the principality. The focus of this paper is the social practices model that has been adopted by WERN as the method to develop capacity, how this has been developed through inter-institutional collaboration, and the impact it has had at the individual and institutional levels. The evaluation data that we discuss has been gathered as a part of the of internal evaluation process (a fuller account of this can be found in Davies &Salisbury (in preparation)), or is the result of the external evaluation conducted by Prof. John Gardner, Queen’s University, Belfast (Gardner,2008). The paper will conclude with a summary that reflects on what we have found out about building capacity-in particular what has worked and what has created obstacles – and what we can draw from this for future capacity building initiatives