Building a bridge between the University and the Ministry of Education

With an ever-growing community of Luxembourg-based educational researchers, a strong need for coordinating research processes in and around schools naturally emerged. Due to certain national specifics — most notably Luxembourg’s small size and its inherent multilingualism — the national education system is a highly attractive context for topical educational research. In order to maximize synergies and facilitate communication with internal and external stakeholders, LUCET (Luxembourg Centre for Educational Testing) has been assigned to act as a “Bridge-Builder” and future single point of contact between the Luxembourg education system and University-of-Luxembourg-based educational research.

Regulate, facilitate and centralise

The main mission of the Bridge-Builder is to centralise, regulate and facilitate demands from the research community to the Ministry of Education (MENJE) and from the education system to the University of Luxembourg, as well as, in the long term, to collect information about research projects and build a searchable online repository on educational research. The benefit will obviously be a streamlining of research related interactions between the two big players and an enhanced visibility of University based educational research.

A single point of contact

The Bridge-Builder has been created as a joint venture between the Ministry of Education and the University of Luxembourg. On an institutional level, the Bridge-Builder is embedded in LUCET on the University side and in the Service de Coordination de la Recherche et de l’Innovation pédagogiques et technologiques (SCRIPT) on the Ministry side. Thus, it is a common structure with a single point of contact in each of the both institutions.

Practically, the Bridge-Builder teams in both institutions will handle applications addressed to the MENJE as well as requests emanating from the MENJE in the field of educational research. Requests emanating from the MENJE include demands for expertise or research proposals on a specific topic. A dissemination procedure on University side will give a greater visibility to research and expertise requests from the MENJE in the University of Luxembourg research community.

Applications addressed to the MENJE are either in response to a research or an expertise request (“a call”) from the Ministry or research proposals on the initiative of the researcher. The latter may include for instance demands for data collection in schools (or other educational contexts) or for support from the Ministry.