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In this paper, based on an invited keynote given at the 2022 Colloquium of the Society for Educational Studies, I explore the question of the integrity of educational studies. I ask is whether educational studies in their current configuration are able to offer resistance to the instrumentalisation of education and the push towards empirical research that is only interested in finding out what works, but is unable to engage with this question in a properly educational way. Through a reconstruction of the history of educational studies in the English-speaking world, I show how educational studies are predominantly configured as an 'applied field'. The problem with this configuration is that educational studies lack the resources for generating educational questions about and an educational perspective on education. I show why this is a problem, also in relation to ongoing misunderstandings and misrepresentations of education. In the final part of the paper I outline two approaches, one focusing on educational concepts and one highlighting the unique and distinctive form of education, that may help to build a stronger identity for educational studies. I see this as a major challenge for the future of educational studies in the English-speaking world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the current crisis in education research and how we might confront it. It begins by arguing that the 'coming crisis' facing empirical sociology identified by Savage and Burrows (2007) applies equally – if not more so – to empirical education research. Education researchers can no longer lay claim to specialist expertise in the analysis of social institutions and our 'tools of the trade' are increasingly unviable. These developments are compounded by the dominance of the 'cultural turn' within British education research which has made it difficult for education researchers to develop a cumulative evidence base, leading to a lack of traction with policymakers and a privileging of cultural inequalities in education over economic inequalities. The paper discusses how the education research community might respond to the challenges and considers whether we might do worse than follow the suggestion offered to sociologists that they should take 'a descriptive turn'. Taking such a turn will not be easy, but the alternative may be that education research in the UK will be even more marginalised as it becomes increasingly out-of-step with the developments in data, evidence and analysis being fostered outside the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]