Last Updated on October 19, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Schools are where most research on education takes place, and they bring their own advantages and problems whatever method a researcher chooses. This post sets out the main issues, for the Methods in Context question on AQA Paper 1 (7192/1).
Researching in education
Pupils · Teachers · Parents · Classrooms · Issues in schools
How to use these in the exam: How to Answer Methods in Context Questions
Representativeness
There are tens of thousands of schools in the United Kingdom: England alone had 24,499 in 2025/26. That means observational research which focuses on just one school, or a handful of schools, will be unrepresentative.
The same problem applies to the popular documentary programmes that focus on just one school. They are very interesting because they follow the stories of the school and some (but only some) of its pupils and teachers, but they are never going to be representative of all schools!
Schools are data-rich institutions
A lot of official statistics on schools are freely available on the Department for Education’s Explore Education Statistics service: information on results, attendance and exclusions, for example. Every school’s latest Ofsted report is also available online. So using a mixture of secondary qualitative and quantitative data may be a good choice for researchers.
A researcher could also use official statistics to select a sample of schools that represents all the regions of England, different Ofsted inspection outcomes, and/or different types of school.
HOWEVER, official statistics on education can be misleading. Exam results may not reflect the underlying ethos of a school, or show the difficulties a particular school faces. Schools can also manipulate their data to an extent. For example, they can reduce their exclusion figures by ‘off-rolling’: Ofsted defines this as removing a pupil from the school roll without using a permanent exclusion, when it is “primarily in the best interests of the school, rather than the best interests of the pupil”. This includes pressuring parents to take their child out of the school.
Access
Schools are potentially very convenient places to conduct research. The law requires pupils to attend, and teachers and managers need to attend to keep their jobs, so you can be reasonably certain that most of the people you want to research are going to be there. You have a captive audience!
HOWEVER, school gatekeepers (head teachers, for example) may be reluctant to let researchers in. They may see research as disruptive, and fear it will interfere with their duty to educate students.
Time
Schools are also highly organised, busy institutions. Researchers may find it difficult to find time to ask pupils and teachers questions during the school day, which could make interviews a problem and push the researcher towards observation, which tends to be less representative.
Fitting in
The researcher will also need to blend in. Otherwise teachers and students alike may see them as an outsider, which won’t help in getting people to open up and give valid information.
How this comes up in the exam
Whatever the method and topic in a Methods in Context question, the research is almost always set in schools, so these issues can be applied to nearly any answer. Link each one to the method in the question: for example, gatekeepers and time pressure matter far more for interviews and participant observation than for secondary data.
Signposting
This post has been written primarily for students studying research methods in context, as part of the AQA’s A-level Sociology course.
It is one of five posts on research contexts in education: Researching Pupils, Researching Teachers, Researching Parents and Researching in Classrooms cover the others.
For an AQA answer awarded full marks, see Methods in Context Questions: A Full Mark Answer from the AQA.
Please click here to return to the Research Methods page, or here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com.