A new venture - bridging the gap between educational research and policy and practice

A different sort of editorial, relating to a different sort of enterprise. Issues to do with relationships between researchers and practitioners and policy-makers have been pretty high on the international educational research agenda for some time. Amongst the, at times, acrimonious bickering has been the issue to do with the accessibility of educational research (to practitioners and policy-makers). BERA has recently attempted to contribute to ways forward in this area through the development of 'Professional User Reviews' (PURs) in the UK. As BERJ editors, we feel that both the PUR products and the PUR process may well be of some interest to BERJ readers. We therefore invited Professor Leone Burton (PURs Editor) to contribute a piece for this editorial and this follows. We recognize of course that readers may appraise this different sort of enterprise in different sorts of ways ... it would be pretty dull if you didn't.