PROVIDING A FRAMEWORK FOR A ‘SHARED REPERTOIRE’ IN A CROSS-NATIONAL RESEARCH PROJECT

There is currently a growth of interest and activity in the area of comparative cross-national partnership research. This is stimulated by methodological, ideological, political and economic developments particularly within the European Union, where European Commission funding has supported numerous projects. Whereas the ‘old’ comparative education focused solely on large-scale quantitative projects to establish differences in educational effectiveness of different nations, the ‘new’ comparative research is developing innovative methodologies in order to undertake studies which take account of tradition, context and national and local education policy (Broadfoot, 2002a, b; Osborn, 2004). Both these forms of research, however, are subject to broadly the same set of methodological issues surrounding their effectiveness.