How should educational research be contracted? And is there anything wrong with the way that public funding of educational research is currently administered? We endeavour to answer these questions by appeal to the work of two of the most prominent philosophers of science of the twentieth century, namely Popper and Kuhn. Although their normative views of science are radically different, we show that they would nonetheless agree on a number of key rules concerning the extent to which scientific practice should be influenced "from the outside". We then show that these rules are often broken in the way that research is publicly funded in the UK. (Contains 28 notes and 1 figure.)