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Scottish Council for Research in Education


The Scottish Council for Research in Education (SCRE) was set up by the Scottish teachers’ union (The Educational Institute of Scotland, EIS) and the Association of Directors of Education in 1928. At that time, there were no similar organisations anywhere in the world. The Council itself consisted of some 60 members drawn from a wide range of bodies with an interest in education. This Council appointed a director and arranged for some basic funding to come from government local authorities, but the EIS provided free accommodation and secretarial assistance. For more than 20 years, most of the work was carried out by groups of teachers on a voluntary basis.

Throughout these years and on into the 1980s Council staff and associates made distinguished contributions to educational research, often setting world standards. Two key reports were the reports of 1921 and 1947 nationwide assessment of age-11 IQ in Scotland.

The authors of the Council's early publications make up a who's who of the greats in this field — Godfrey Thomson, Drever, P.E.Vernon, McClelland and Boyd. These men influenced educational thinking throughout the world. They found worthy successors in later years — Maxwell, Fraser, Clark, Nisbet, Hope, Dockrell, Patricia Broadfoot, Spencer, John Raven, Ian Deary.

In later years the Council's research programme came more and more under government control with the Council itself finally being disbanded and the few remaining staff moved to an all-but non-existent renamed Scottish Center for Educational research within the Faculty of Education of Glasgow University. Its website was likewise disbanded. For this reason a complete list of the publications of the Council is no longer available.

A short but comprehensive account of the Council's work has been contributed by Powell and an earlier, but fuller, account by Morris.

Powell, John L. (2012) The Scottish Council for Research in Education 1928-2003: a Short History, Scottish Educational Review, 44, 59-76. www.scotedreview.org.uk/pdf/348pdf

Morris, J.G. (1994) The Scottish Council for Educational Research 1928-1993. Edinburgh University PhD thesis. (Copy available from National Library for Scotland.)

Some indication of the scope of the Council's more recent work may be derived from the list below. Although several are not Council publications they indicate the nature of some of the work ... and refer to subsequent developments built upon it.


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