Uncovering the landscape of cross-national UK education research: an exploratory review

ABSTRACT

Background

Internationally, research comparing education systems across countries and jurisdictions is valuable and can elicit nuanced insights into how particular systems operate. This paper’s interest lies in considering the scope and content of research comparing education systems across the four UK nations (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales).

Purpose

This study sought to determine the coverage of UK cross-national comparative education research (‘home international’ research) between 2000 and 2022. We chose this time period as 1999 marks the devolution of education policy to each UK nation. We aimed to investigate what educational issues had been discussed in the literature and identify any gaps in the content covered by the research.

Method

An exploratory, high-level review of ‘home international’ education research was conducted, based on the review of abstracts. We searched several research databases using a variety of keyword combinations to identify relevant literature published since 2000. Our search identified 53 studies that met our selection criteria. Using a meta-synthesis approach, we coded the content of each abstract to build a picture of the range and thematic coverage of research involving comparisons between at least two of the four UK nations.

Findings

The analysis of abstracts identified that, over the last two decades, UK ‘home international’ research has tended to include comparisons of all four nations, coverage of multiple educational phases and a focus on national education policy reviews. Furthermore, we pinpointed a number of gaps in coverage that might not have been anticipated (e.g. relatively little cross-national research focusing on assessment).

Conclusion

This high-level review uncovers the landscape of recent ‘home international’ research, allowing us to view issues that are driving the cross-national research agenda in the UK and recognise implications relevant to education systems that may resonate with jurisdictions beyond these four UK nations.

KEYWORDS:

• Home international research
• comparative study
• United Kingdom
• education systems
• educational phases
• policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Home internationals’ (see Raffe et al. 1999) is a term used to refer to the four constituent nations of the UK. The term was synonymous with a series of football tournaments that took place involving England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales between 1884 and 1984. The term has been adopted by many researchers interested in cross-national comparison work in the UK (e.g. Brisard, Menter, and Smith 2007; M. Donnelly and Evans 2019; Gray, Hooper, and Sandford 2022; Hodgson et al. 2019; Phillips 2003).

2. Grey literature typically includes (but is not limited to) the following: working papers, theses, white papers, policy documents (University of Leeds n.d.). In this study, we also classified sources as grey literature if we could not identify what the literature output type was with confidence.

3. ISCED (see further https://uis.unesco.org/en/topic/international-standard-classification-education-isced) is a well-known framework maintained by the UNSECO Institute for Statistics (UIS) that classifies educational activities and qualifications into internationally agreed groups to facilitate data comparison across national contexts. We adapted the framework slightly to make it relevant for our project and used the following codes. 01: early childhood education (below age 3); 02: pre-primary education (age 3 onwards); 1: primary education; 2: lower secondary education; 3: upper secondary education; 4: post-secondary education; 5: cross-phase education.