Evidence-informed policy and practice in a ‘post-truth’ society

Abstract

Particularly since the British vote to leave the European Union (otherwise known as Brexit) and the election of Donald Trump in the USA, there has been much talk of our living in a ‘post-truth’ society, where ‘alternative truths’ compete with each other and where ‘experts’ are often derided and ‘common sense’ celebrated even where it seems to be contradicted by ‘evidence’ (d’Ancona 2017). Calcutt (2016) has suggested that the origins of ‘post-truth’ lay with academics espousing ‘post-modernism’ and other ‘left-leaning, self-confessed liberals’ who sought freedom from state-sponsored truth and started to discredit ‘truth’ as one of the ‘grand narratives’ that needed to be replaced with ‘truths’-‘always plural, frequently personalised, inevitably relativised’. Although both the political and academic versions of ‘post-truth’ may be criticised for undermining any sense of certainty about how we should proceed in educational policy and practice, we suggest in this article that exaggerated claims about the possibility of establishing consensual answers on the basis of research evidence are equally suspect and to be resisted.