Thematic Dossiers

1 June 2006  I  Alan McCluskey

Understanding innovation in education
Innovation is one of those weighty words that are eagerly bandied around in modern society. The importance of
innovation can partly be seen in the fact that educational policies are expected to be innovative rather than simply
appropriate. Yet for all its weight, there remain many questions about its substance. What exactly is innovation? Is it
the same everywhere? How does it work? When questioned about their understanding of the concept of innovation,
members of European Schoolnet’s Policy and Innovation Committee meeting in Barcelona came up with quite a
diversity of visions.

To further explore the concept, they were asked to give an example of a project they saw as innovative and to explain
why they thought it to be so. Anja Balanskat, Stella Kefala and Paul Gerhard from the EUN Office have expanded on
that work in the present edition of "Policy and Innovation in Education" reproduced on insight as a Thematic Dossier.

There is also a need to raise the question of the relationship between innovation, policymaking and practice. This I
have tried to do in my article about innovation in policy and practice. Bert Jaap van Oel has looked at the use of peer
reviewing between school inspectors as a source of innovation through the experience of the P2P project. And finally,
Mick James has explored ways and means of transferring and extending the impact of innovation, taking examples
from work done by BECTA. All the articles printed here are also available online at insight.eun.org. More information
about the P2P project can be found at p2p.insight.org.

Web Editor: Bart Vanhulle

Keywords: educational innovation, educational policy
Last changed: Wednesday, 31 May 2006