Creating a culture of high expectations: complexities and challenges

Labelling and notions of fixed ability are prevalent in our education system. Students are divided into groups according to their prior attainment and ‘appropriate’ work is provided as a...

The Adventure of Education

Is it possible to think about education as adventure? This is a question I raised in a recent article I wrote for the Journal of Education Administration and History (Tamboukou 2016). The idea...

Are private schools really that good?

Recently research sponsored by the Independent Schools Council (ISC) was released that “attending an Independent school in England is associated with the equivalent of two additional years of...

What do ‘skills’ mean for school governing bodies?

In a recently published article[i] in the Journal of Education Policy (JEP), I traced how governors with ‘skills’ are increasingly privileged over representative governors. I wrote about the...

Explaining Trump’s Rise, Educationally

The rise of Donald Trump as front running Republican Party presidential candidate in the United States has startled many left-liberal leaning members of the society, and captured the attention of...

The essence of social pedagogy

Background...

Could the study of historical contingency help to enliven students’ critical citizenship?

Critical citizenship education often amounts to training in critical thinking – rudimentary discourse analysis or media criticism aimed at developing critical literacy skills. Such skills are...

Using visual methods to help us move from researching on to researching with

My recently completed PhD (Clark, 2015) explored my 23-year long (meandering) academic journey through participatory research. I have always been interested in how we can do research differently...

Pupil voice in quality assurance of schools

Highlights from the first 1,000 BERA Blog posts

The importance of quality assurance in education is established both by politicians and teachers alike. Schools embrace quality assurance primarily because they recognise its role in...