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 EIS arranged for some basic funding to come from Government Local Authorities, but it also itself provided free accommodation and secretarial assistance. For more than a quarter of a century, 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. The authors of the Council's early publications make up a Who's Who of the greats in this field — Drever, Vernon, Thomson, McLelland and Boyd. These people influenced educational thinking throughout the world. They found worthy successors in later years — Maxwell, Fraser, Clark, Nisbet, Hope, Dockrell, Broadfoot, Spencer, Raven, Deary.

In recent years the Council has come more and more under government control and been moved from Edinburgh to Glasgow. Its role and work have been progressively decimated until it now forms but part of the Faculty of Education of Glasgow University.

It is possible that a comprehensive list of publications may be available at the Council’s website http://www.gla.ac.uk/faculties/education/scre/  but this has currently been removed for updating.

In the meantime the following may give some indication of the scope of its more recent work. Although several are not Council publications they indicate the nature of some of the work ... and refer to subsequent developments built upon it.

Dockrell, W. B., Broadfoot, P. M. et al. (1977). Pupils in Profile. Edinburgh: Scottish Council for Research in Education.

Dockrell, W.B. & Hamilton, D. (1980). Rethinking Educational Research. London: Hodder & Saughton.

Hamilton, D., Jenkins, D., King, C., MacDonald, B., & Parlett, M. (Eds.). (1977). Beyond the Numbers Game. London: MacMillan Education.

Hope, K. (1984). As Others See Us: Schooling and Social Mobility in Scotland and the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Raven, J., & Stephenson, J. (Eds.). (2001). Competence in the Learning Society. New York: Peter Lang.

Raven, J., & Raven, J. (Eds.). (2008). Uses and Abuses of Intelligence: Studies Advancing Spearman and Raven’s Quest for Non-Arbitrary Metrics. Unionville, New York: Royal Fireworks Press; Edinburgh, Scotland: Competency Motivation Project; Budapest, Hungary: EDGE 2000; Cluj Napoca, Romania: Romanian Psychological Testing Services SRL.

Spencer, E. (1983). Writing Matters Across the Curriculum. Edinburgh: Scottish Council for Research in Education.

A list of some 70 publications by a previous Director, W. Bryan Dockrell, will be found in a link cited on that page.

Publications from the longitudinal Mental Development Survey

MacPherson, J. S. (1958). Eleven Year Olds Grow Up. London: University of London Press.

Maxwell, J. N. (1961). The Level and Trend of National Intelligence: The Contribution of the Scottish Mental Surveys. London: University of London Press.

Maxwell, J. N. (1969). Sixteen Years On. Edinburgh: Scottish Council for Research in Education.

Hope, K. (1984). As Others See Us: Schooling and Social Mobility in Scotland and the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Deary, I. J., Whalley, L. W., Lemmon, H., Crawford, J. R., & Starr, J. M. (2000). The stability of individual differences in mental ability from childhood to old age: Follow-up of the 1932 Scottish Mental Survey. Intelligence, 28(1), 49-55.