(Not) Being Seen as Students
With new students arriving in campuses across the country, now is a good a time as any to think about what it means to be, and to be seen as, a student in the UK. In July the Independent...
Continue reading blog postBERA Blog
The BERA Blog was established in 2015 to provide research-informed content on key educational issues in an accessible manner.
Refine results
Framing the geographies of higher education participation: schools, place and national identity
How young people make choices about university, where and what to study has been a question asked by many social researchers, policy-makers and practitioners alike. Research has shown that when...
Continue reading blog postApplying Intelligence to Teacher Education
I was motivated to write this blog after Michael Wilshaw, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector, gave a speech about teacher recruitment and training at the Festival of Education, at Wellington College on...
Continue reading blog post
Much ado about something: The effects of the National Student Survey on higher education
This research (for the British Academy/Leverhulme) set out to gather evidence on the effects of the National Student Survey (NSS) ten years after its introduction. The effects of the survey go...
Continue reading blog post
Structure of professional doctorate programmes
Is it any wonder that there is discussion about the structure of such programmes and what works best for those concerned? What is a doctoral programme? An advanced study of a defined topic? A...
Continue reading blog post
Against research methods courses in HE
It came as no surprise when I encountered a synthesis of 89 papers on research methods education in the social sciences including education (Earley, 2014) which found that students taking research...
Continue reading blog post
Beyond mentoring; peer coaching by and for teachers. Can it live up to its promise?
Creating opportunities for individual teachers to work together for professional development is a common ambition in schools in England. Mentoring forms a critical learning resource for both...
Continue reading blog postWhy does the devil have all the good tunes? How researchers continue to put one over teachers in the HE promotion stakes
The Higher Education Academy (HEA, 2013) published research on Rebalancing promotion in the HE sector: is teaching excellence being rewarded? is appropriately authored by academics from...
Continue reading blog post