This series of reports presents the findings and recommendations of five research projects that have investigated aspects of race and ethnicity across the education sector.

Supported by BERA’s Small Grants Fund (SGF), this work is part of the association’s commitment to address the structural and institutional inequities and unjust power imbalances that affect our members and the wider research community, as set out in our Race Equality Policy. We made five awards, each of which has produced a final report that shares their findings and recommendations for practice, policy and future research endeavours.

The five reports are:

• Ethnicity & the early years workforce: A census of staff in maintained nursery schools in England, by Mona Sakr, Magdalena Dujczynski & Celina Santos Pinto
• Strengthening teacher networks: Decolonising secondary school history curricula, by Anna Olsson Rost
• Race, higher education and special educational needs and disabilities, by Denise Miller
• Variation in Black students’ conceptions of academic support: A phenomenographic study, by Mike Mimirinis, Annita Ventouris & Elina Wright
• Envisioning a gold standard: Understanding higher education institutions’ outlook for race equality policies, practices and future initiatives, by Melissa Jogie

Through the SGF, BERA awards funding annually to research on a different, pressing theme each year, with the intention that each project will:

• make important contributions to the discipline by contributing to and leading current debates
• develop research capacity by involving postgraduate students and early career researchers
• receive applications from and involving practitioners and policymakers as well as academic researchers.