The British Educational Research Journal (BERJ) is BERA’s flagship journal, and has gone from strength to strength in recent years. Indexed by the Institute of Scientific Information, Philadelphia on the Social Science Citation Index, the journal is a major focal point for the publication of educational research from across the globe. BERJ’s Impact Factor is 2.133 and the journal ranks 160^th out of 270 in the Education and Educational Research category.

Although the journal showcases the very best of British educational research, it publishes articles by, and for, researchers in education throughout the world. The journal is interdisciplinary in approach, and includes reports of case studies, experiments and surveys, discussions of conceptual and methodological issues and of underlying assumptions in educational research, and accounts of research in progress. For more information, please visit the website of our publisher, Wiley.

Click here for author guidelines, including instructions on how to submit. When you are ready to submit your article, please do so through the journal’s Research Exchange submission portal.

Members should click on the ‘read this journal online’ button in the top-left corner of this page to use their free access to BERJ.

To request permission to reproduce material from BERJ (or BJET, RoE or Curriculum Journal) please contact our publisher, Wiley, via this page of their site.

BERJ 50th Anniversary Collection

BERJ was established in 1975 and is looking ahead to both its 50th anniversary in 2025, and that of its publisher, BERA, in 2024. To mark these anniversaries, five virtual special issues of the journal are being published through 2022 and 2023 to map the first five decades of BERJ, from 1975 to the present day.

Each issue presents a selection of papers published in one of the decades of the journal’s life and features an introduction by the guest editor(s), with the aim of offering readers an overview of the scholarship that has been published by BERJ since its inception and highlighting trends and developments in the field over the past 50 years.

The first three issues are available now, showcasing articles from the years 1975–1984, 1985–1994 and 1995–2004.

Read the collection here.

BERJ Editors’ Choice Award 2023

The editorial team of BERJ and BERA are delighted to announce the winner of the 2023 Editors’ Choice Award, which recognises papers published in the 2022 volume of the journal.

Five papers were nominated by the BERJ editorial board, and the editors selected the following winning article from the shortlist:

The editors commented: ‘What we like about this paper is that it problematises rather “naïve” and optimistic ideas about children’s voice and participation in research. It does a good job, both in terms of raising difficult questions and connecting those questions with accounts of real-life research.’

The following four papers were shortlisted by the board, in addition to the winning paper:

• Dunlop, L., & Rushton, E. A. C. (2022). Putting climate change at the heart of education: Is England’s strategy a placebo for policy? BERJ, 48(6), 1083–1101. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3816
• Hurry, J., Fridkin, L., & Holliman, A. J. (2022). Reading intervention at age 6: Long-term effects of Reading Recovery in the UK on qualifications and support at age 16. BERJ, 48(1), 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3752
• Norwich, B., Moore, D., Stentiford, L., & Hall, D. (2022). A critical consideration of ‘mental health and wellbeing’ in education: Thinking about school aims in terms of wellbeing. BERJ, 48(4), 803–820. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3795
• Prior, L., & Leckie, G. (2022). Student mobility: Extent, impacts and predictors of a range of movement types for secondary school students in England. BERJ, 48(5), 1027–1048. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3807

A statement on fraudulent impersonations of BERJ

BERA is aware of cases in recent years in which the British Educational Research Journal (BERJ) and other BERA journals have been impersonated online, with would-be contributing authors asked for money in order to have their article published in what subsequently proves to be a substandard publication that uses the journal’s name fraudulently.

 We ask authors to be vigilant and to report any such fraudulent representations to us at publications@bera.ac.uk.

Wiley is the sole publisher of BERJ, and all articles should be submitted online through the Manuscript Central service linked to above. No fee is charged for publishing in BERJ, other than optional charges for open access publishing (the ‘article publication charge’) and for the reproduction of figures in colour (as opposed to black and white) – click here for further information on both.