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Most people in this country have read or heard of the language laboratory. Surprisingly few, even of those involved in training, fully understand what it is and does. Probably no piece of educational equipment has ever enjoyed such publicity and yet been so misrepresented, misunderstood and, consequently miscast.

Until the exigencies of the last war brought about an ever‐changing staff, members of the Midland Bank had always received on‐the‐job training in the branch, but in 1940 it was realised that with the rapid draining‐off of experienced clerks, branches could no longer continue their own staff instruction and so the first Training Branches were brought into operation. These were set up mainly to give new entrants basic instruction in bank work, so that they would be of use to a branch as soon as they joined the staff. Since that time the pattern has been one of constant evolution. More Training Branches have been opened as the need has arisen to cover further areas of the country and deal with greater numbers of students. Courses now cover a wide field, from new entrant training right through to pre‐managerial instruction, and the whole conception of modern training is far removed from its very modest beginning 30 years ago.

In this chapter, we consider collaborative models of engaged research in comparison to models of team science that include persons with lived experience of the topic area as team members. ‘Co-led’, ‘co-design’ and ‘co-research’ are all terms used in the literature with distinct, but not precise, definitions and approaches. These collaborative models tend to describe methods that allow those with lived experience to be treated differently than other academic members of the research team. Power imbalances between those with lived experiences and researchers persist in such models, in spite of researcher efforts. For example, persons with lived experience are often described as being compensated with gift cards which may be welcomed but can be perceived as diminishing their role and contribution. In contrast, participatory team science involves persons with lived experience as full members of the research team. In the model that we propose, power is balanced through mutual planning and consensus-based decision-making. We contend that using participatory team science advances research through egalitarian consideration of team members' perspectives of the research problem and the designs necessary to knowledge development.