When Shall weThree Researchmeet Again: A Reflective Analysis to Understand #FEResearchmeet as a Lens for Developing a Research Culture in Further Education

This reflective piece follows a presentation at the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (Jones et al., 2025), takes up the key theses of that presentation, and sets out the authors’ joint thinking as we move towards designing an empirical study to explore how #FEResearchmeet influenced and professionally developed further education (FE) workers. The paper sets out the systemic problems in the FE Sector around continuous professional development (CPD) and research and the historical failures in these areas before offering models such as #FEResearchmeet as a solution. That is, a voluntary research event by and for practitioners. The paper focuses on their impact, influence, and demonstrable ability to develop knowledge in the sector. The paper concludes with the challenges that this presents and strategic recommendations for policy makers and sector leaders. Whilst we acknowledge that much of the published work around #FEResearchmeet is anecdotal, our analysis of the collective voices exploring the initiative and its impact on participants and the wider sector (Cook et al., 2023; Crowson et al., 2020; Jones et al., 2024; Jones & Scattergood, 2025; Scattergood, in Jones, 2025) creates reliability or ‘trustworthiness’, (Golafshani, 2003), from these numerous sources notably from co-authorship.