What’s the Difference?
GCSE results published by the Department for Education (DfE) show enormous variations between the performance of English secondary schools. If we are serious about school improvement then it is...
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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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Power to the People; Can Teacher Coaching be viewed as a form of Transformational Leadership?
There is something both alluring and disquieting about theories which can be summed up as a catchy combination of letters and numbers. They create a hook, something which we can engage with, may...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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