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From our experience of monitoring teachers who first undertake action research in their classrooms and then try to form a collaborative group in their various schools it does seem to be the case eventually that, as Holly claims [1] action research and educational institutions have dichotomous polar tendencies such that there is a dialectical tension between them. While action research fosters collegiality, informality, openness and collaboration action researchers have to contend with educational institutions that are structured hierarchically with formal asymmetrical relations of power and responsibility. These, seen as polar tendencies, contribute to the struggle between two 'political' realities where, usually, the action research project is, to use Holly's words, emasculated, neutralised, cut down to size by and within the institution.This account is illuminating as far as it goes, but we think there is more to be said and explained about the tension. It is not just the 'democratic' relationships alone among a group of assistant teachers doing action research that poses a threat to the status quo but the consequences of such collaboration arising from a critique of teaching and learning, of curriculum provision, of treatment of pupils and the purposes of education, that threaten to subvert the social reality and the hegemony of the principal. For, having monitored teachers' attempts to form collaborative groups within their schools we find a source of difficulty not only to be resistance from some principals but also (and more importantly) from some teachers themselves to the action researcher's attempts to have them join in a critique of individual and social practice. This resistance does not just happen incidentally however. We are going to suggest, on the contrary, that it is an inevitable outcome of the way a school is structured, in short, that the hierarchical order not only differentiates power and responsibility but, in maintaining teacher isolation in the classroom, contributes to the resistance of teachers to criticism, change and improvement. By offering to challenge the values embedded in the social reality in order to improve it action research is perceived as a threat not only to the hierarchy but also to notions of professional competence that assistant teachers have. In short, between an action researcher and his colleagues in the school tension often

A recent survey of the impact on graduates of the University of Ulster's MSc programme in education management has identified issues concerning the nature and purpose of education in the current social and political climate of Northern Ireland. The evidence suggests that most of them use some form of action research to accommodate themselves to, and make more efficient, the operations of the organisation in which they work. This means that their work is circumscribed by the market values embedded in the Education Reform Order (Northern Ireland) (1989). When this evidence is placed into the whole of the UK's social, educational and political context and the history of education in Northern Ireland, it becomes clear why educational action research falls outside the concerns of current educational provision at institutional level. Because the Northern Ireland curriculum is a replication of the English National Curriculum, itself a response to the politically defined English economic situation, there is seen to be no need to prepare future citizens of a new Northern Ireland any differently to those in England. Yet the current and most pressing problem in Northern Ireland is the lack of political stability. Whatever the outcome of the current peace negotiations, it is vital that the next generation be helped by their teachers to be able to think for themselves and so be able to evaluate in a rational way the political, economic and historical faces of their social environment. It is argued that there is a need to reappraise current educational purposes and practices based on the dominant political free market ideology.

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