This special issue of Evidence & Policy focuses on growing concerns around misinformation, disinformation and research misuse in education policy. This introduction to the issue shows how education policy is a unique and particularly vulnerable information ecosystem because it is deeply contested, highly politicized, often structurally decentralized and susceptible to intermediaries who frame problems, package evidence and influence policy discourse. Drawing on scholarship across multiple fields-including misinformation studies, policy studies and education research-our introduction highlights how misinformation in education is not only a question of false claims, but also of strategic framing and the selective use of 'evidence' in service of ideological agendas. The introduction summarizes the six articles in the issue, which examine topics including civics teachers' information use, anti-LGBTQIA+ advocacy campaigns, countermeasures to misinformation, authoritarian discourse in Hungary, research misuse in knowledge brokering, and shifting claims about evidence-based education in Australia. Several themes emerge within and across these articles: the centrality of systemic and contextual factors, the importance of intermediaries, the role of language and norms, and the imperative for interdisciplinary, comparative and critically informed approaches to this increasingly critical issue. We conclude by discussing how researchers and practitioners can combine efforts around media literacy, institutional reform, accountability for knowledge brokers, with a more rigorous interrogation of what counts as evidence in education policy.
Background: Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are increasingly recognised for their potential to build research capacity in adult social care (ASC), yet the mechanisms enabling or constraining their impact remain under-explored. This article reports on the SCRiPT study, a National Institute for Health and Care Research-funded RPP in England that utilised a Communities of Practice (CoP) approach. Aims: To operationalise an RPP by establishing Research in Practice Teams (RiPTs)-comprising social care professionals, lived experience contributors and academics-and to evaluate the mobilisation of research learning and identify transferable lessons for embedding collaborative RPPs. Methods: Using a convergent multi-method design across four RiPTs, the intervention included bespoke training and support for small-scale projects. Data from interviews, focus groups, observations and questionnaires were analysed using Normalisation Process Theory and informed by CoP principles. Findings: RiPTs achieved strong organisational buy-in through senior leadership support and collaborative priority-setting. However, sustained engagement was hindered by systemic infrastructure gaps, operational pressures and complex governance. While lived experience contributions enhanced research relevance, RiPTs functioned more as traditional research teams than CoPs, highlighting tensions between collaborative ideals and organisational realities. Conclusions: RPPs can catalyse research engagement in ASC, but sustainability requires structural investment, protected time and context-relevant academic support. SCRiPT highlights that embedding RPPs in complex service environments depends on equitable collaboration, adaptability and multi-level organisational commitment.
Introduction: In this article we explore how critical actors can be incentivised to take a systems approach to pursue preventative public health. More specifically, we focus on the link between urban environments and their effect on non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as obesity, cancers, cardiovascular and respiratory disease. Improving urban environments as a route to preventative public health is well known but it is complicated and requires multi-actor decision-making. For example, reducing cardiovascular disease through better urban design will require global investment companies, central government, local planners, public health teams, private house builders and local residents to find ways to develop joint solutions. Methods: We draw on 167 qualitative interviews with key actors from across the urban development system in England to explore how an innovative economic valuation tool - the Health Appraisal for Urban Systems (HAUS) tool - could support multi-actor decision-making. Analytic plan: We analyse the data using a multi-stage, transdisciplinary thematic analysis. Coding involved a collaborative deductive and inductive process. Results: Findings reveal that actors from state, market and civil society could see the value of this tool, which evidences the link between different features of the urban environment, health outcomes and their economic valuation. Indeed, actors confirmed that the tool offered something new to incentivise joint decision-making and there was an appetite for its use. Conclusion: We conclude by arguing that the HAUS tool offers an important source of evidence to encourage cross-system collaboration for promoting preventative public health.
Introduction:Debates on educational disinformation typically target false content in curricula or online. This study reconceptualizes the phenomenon as the discursive reconstruction of education's purpose, the strategic redefinition of its values and social functions that becomes naturalized as common sense. Existing scholarship documents Hungary's institutional capture but neglects the discursive mechanisms transforming political rhetoric into educational meaning. The study asks how Viktor Orbán's speeches construct education's societal role and how these representations become embedded in curricular content. Methods/Data:The primary corpus comprises Orbán's official speeches (2022-2025) from the Hungarian government website; an education-keyword search yielded 110 speeches, from which 236 relevant segments were retained. Purposively sampled grade 5-12 textbooks (civics, history, literature) and selected 2015-2021 speeches provide illustrative, intertextual triangulation. Analytic Plan:The study applies Fairclough's three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis, examining discourse as text, discursive practice and social practice. Through iterative open and focused coding of speech segments, three discursive representations were derived inductively and analysed across all three dimensions. Results:Orbán constructs education through three interlocking representations: national preservation (schools as guardians of Christian-national identity), economic engine (vocational training as sovereignty), and ideological resistance (schools as fortresses against liberal 'contamination'). Together they achieve hegemonic closure, rendering pluralism unthinkable; textbook content materializes this rhetoric as pedagogical fact. Conclusion/Implications:Educational disinformation operates through meaning reconstruction, 'epistemic engineering', not only factual falsehood, making fact-checking insufficient in itself. Monitoring democratic backsliding should track discursive shifts in institutions' self-described purposes, since classroom meanings shape future citizens' political imaginations.
