The paper explores how academic staff in four Education Departments in UK universities (two in England, two in Scotland), experience and understand the relationship between research and teaching and how the higher education policy context alongside their own biographies, career identities and departmental cultures help to shape such understandings. The implications of this for academics in Education Departments and indeed other academic disciplines in the rest of Europe whose working conditions are often quite varied (Enders, 2001) are considered in the light of the Bologna agreement and the development of the European Research Area, both policies attempting to bring European higher education closer together. Recent policy emanating from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and particularly as presented in the 2003 White Paper The Future of Higher Education (Department for Education and Skills, 2003) has encouraged the concentration of research funding in a smaller number of universities and increased the possibility of universities being polarised as either highly research-intensive or teaching-only. By contrast, in Scotland, which has devolved powers of government and its own Parliament, there is an assumption on behalf of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) that all Scottish universities will continue to do both research and teaching, though research collaboration between institutions is strongly encouraged. Furthermore, whilst in England the quality of educational research is constantly being criticised and its funding threatened, in Scotland, a new stream of applied educational research funding has been set up. In England the Humboldtian insistence on the link between teaching and research is being seriously brought into question if not effectively severed within UK Higher Education whereas the link is seemingly still being nurtured in Scotland. England seems to be moving towards a post-Humboldtian future (Schimank and Winnes, 2000) in which teaching and research are effectively detached, whereas Scotland seems keen to keep the two linked. Recent research in Australia suggests that the epistemological assumptions of academics are important to their understandings of research, teaching and learning (Robertson and Bond, 2003). We felt such assumptions would be particularly interesting in a subject area like Education, which is multi-disciplinary. The paper draws on interviews undertaken with academic staff from two Education departments at two universities in England and two universities in Scotland. The interviews examined biographical and career histories, how links between research and teaching are viewed, departmental cultures and reactions to current HE policies. The interviewees included women and men, those engaged in initial teacher education and those involved in other postgraduate teaching, and academics who are currently research-active as well as those who are not. The data suggest that unlike policy makers in England, academics in Education Departments in both countries do see a link between research and teaching as being important for academics, teaching and students. Indeed if such a link were not perceived, it augurs ill for the future of European higher education which has until now placed considerable emphasis on the research/teaching relationship as a distinctive feature of universities.