Social Mobility and the Family
Social mobility has become an essential policy solution, an apparent panacea for inequality, injustice and unfairness (Hoskins & Barker, 2014). The idea of individuals transcending their...
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The BERA Blog was established in 2015 to provide research-informed content on key educational issues in an accessible manner.
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Correcting the ‘Grammar’ in Social Mobility
In recognising Brexit as a game changer, Teresa May entered Number 10 Downing Street with a commitment to restore the fortunes of working families and to narrowing egregious inequalities in...
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Agency and Structure: Towards a New Paradigm for Social Mobility in Post-Brexit Britain
I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege; where it's your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent...
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The desire for knowledge
I came across this innocuous looking phrase in an interview with the French sociologist of education Bernard Charlot on the internet. He was quoting the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to explain how...
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Subject Hierarchies and the Purpose of Learning – Time to press re-set?
The announcement last month that AQA was to withdraw the final History of Art A level specification brought a critical response in the press and on social media, not simply because it represented...
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Social Mobility and Secondary Moderns
The perhaps deliberately leaked return to secondary modern schooling took playing politics with education to a new low. It signalled May’s appropriation of another of UKIP’s policies but,...
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The paradoxical nature of Swedish school reform
a rigid concept of teaching where discipline in the classroom seems more important than the overriding goal of the curriculum In a recent publication in the Curriculum Journal (Fredholm,...
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How Entrepreneurship Education can reproduce social inequalities
This article argues for the dismantling of the myth of classlessness in entrepreneurship education. Discourse in favour of more entrepreneurship in education has contributed to a process where a...
Continue reading blog postWhy do teachers quit and what could help them to stay?
I recently conducted a study on the reported “national scandal” of teachers leaving the profession. For example, 40% of teachers are found to leave within their first five years (Wilshaw,...
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