Chapter 11: Responding to the Hyperlocal Turn in Education: What Role Is There for Professionally Led Research–Practice Partnerships in Place-Based Policy Enactment?

Research–practice partnerships (RPPs) are a growing movement in England and internationally, based on the rationale that effective education improvement requires the participation of a range of educational actors to create new forms of knowledge and feed these into local and hyperlocal practices. They tend to be situated within defined local or hyperlocal contexts and are well-positioned to enact national policy in research-informed, contextually relevant ways through the development of strong, long-lasting relationships, mutuality, trust, shared values and a shared commitment to local outcomes. This chapter will present an illustrative case study of Riverside, a hyperlocal RPP in England. In doing so, we will use the notion of expansive learning (Engeström, 2015) – where expertise is socially produced through negotiated knotworking (Engeström & Pyörälä, 2021) – as a conceptual framework to argue that hyperlocal RPPs are well-positioned to reimagine and enact policy in ways that creatively unite diverse stakeholders’ endogenous knowledge of their neighbourhoods and communities, with researchers’ exogenous knowledge – both theoretical and empirical. In developing this argument, this chapter will also consider the challenges inherent within building, and indeed sustaining, these partnerships. In this way, it connects to the collection theme of policy entanglement as deeply contextual, by exploring the complex role that situated socio-spatial relationships and knowledges might play in hyperlocal policy enactment, as well as what researchers might contribute to this.