The State of Educational Research in Denmark

John Benedicto Krejsler
Department of Education (DPU), Aarhus University
February 2012

In Denmark educational research takes place mainly at seven universities. In terms full-time employed academics doing educational research about half takes places at the previous Danish University of Education in Copenhagen, which is now merged into Aarhus University as the Department of Education. The rest takes places at Roskilde University, University of South Denmark, Aalborg University and Copenhagen University in that order. University Colleges that are responsible for educating professionals like teachers, pre-school teachers, nurses, social workers and so forth are gradually moving into educational research, mostly in collaboration with the universities. The latter institutions have gradually since the turn of the millennium been moved in a more academic direction, fully in line with Danish compliance with goals and performance indicators of the Bologna Process.

Around 2004 the Danish research council system was revised in dual system of the Strategic Research Council and the Free Research Councils. This reform has led to more funding being decided according to government priorities, and less by researcher own formulated projects. The section of the Free Research Councils called Culture and Communication is the most relevant for researcher-defined educational research. The rate of success for funding applications is approximately 10 %.

The previous centre-right government allotted so-called Globalization resources to fund research in order to reach the percentage goals of the Lisbon Agenda in relation to GDP. These resources run out in 2012, which has led to considerable anxiety as to how research funding will be financed in 2013 and onwards. It remains to be seen how the newly installed social-democrat led government will deal will research funding in general, and funding of educational research in particular, in a precarious and deteriorating financial situation. They have announced that free research will be prioritized higher. They have announced that education will be boosted and potentially educational research as well.

Furthermore there are a number of private foundations that welcome educational research that deal with issues like social cohesion, bullying in schools, inclusion, diversity and so forth.

Danish universities, including educational researchers are strongly encouraged to go for a larger bid of EU funding, i.e. the 7th Framework Program and other EAC-programmes (LifeLong Learning, Socrates etc.). Furthermore some funding is possible via NordForsk, the research funding part of the Nordic Council.

The previous centre-right government made a considerable pull in the direction that much more educational research should be more directly linked to the immediate needs of policy-makers and practitioners, following the OECD/CERI report on Danish R&D in 2004. This also led to the establishment of the Danish Clearinghouse for Educational Research in 2006, which was commissioned to develop evidence-oriented reviews that synthesized what educational research says about What Works in education (inspiration was to drawn from WWC and EPPI among others). Along the same lines of argumentation the Center for School Research was established at the Danish School of Education, which is deeply involved among other things in transnational comparative projects like PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, ICCS and so forth.

One seems to observe an increasing split between so-called blue sky research, which are in for harder times, and so-called practitioner and policy-maker relevant research, which gets higher priority.

All in all educational research is in a period of fundamental change, due to university and funding reforms as well as financial crisis and government austerity. More collaboration with external stakeholders is required. The aim is often formulated as securing that research contributes more explicitly to ensure that Denmark gets a sizable bit of the stakes in an emerging competitive global knowledge economy.