Professor Linda Clarke:

I have the honour of being the northern chair of SCoTENS and it has just had its eight year evaluation from Professor John Furlong of the University of Oxford who produced a report that was highly complimentary about the work of SCoTENS in building collaborative research partnerships between teacher educators throughout Ireland and, as he put it, establishing links which can be built to develop the peace process through allowing colleagues to communicate with each other and build up collaborative partnerships. He pointed out both areas, the collaborations around research and the communication on both sides of the Border with people who would not normally necessarily have worked together in the past. SCoTENS has been a great success in terms of cross-Border communication around research. We would like to build on the strengths of SCoTENS and build collaborative projects and build capacity for research because capacity building research can be very complex to establish. A further important area is building the dissemination process because it is no good if we as researchers conduct the research and keep the findings to ourselves; the findings need to be disseminated both within Ireland and further afield in order that we build international reputations in research. If our appearance here today can further establish research and research funding on an all-Ireland basis, that would be very helpful to institutions across all the areas of interest that we described.