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Rethinking sex and relationship education in the age of #MeToo

In February 2017, the UK government announced that it would introduce legislation to make age-appropriate sex and relationship education (SRE) compulsory within English schools. The objective of...

Faith-based education is (not) what we are talking about

Writings about faith and education tend to fall into particular longstanding debates about: the teaching of religious education in schools; the act (or not) of assembly; the use of religious texts...

Inequality of pedagogy in English schools: How significant is it?

Addressing educational inequality has been a longstanding focus for educational research as well as for English education policy, yet the attainment gap between rich and poor remains constant...

Understanding social transformation and school environments through social network analysis

Some decades ago, several studies advanced an unexpected answer to an age-old question: schools do not help students improve their social positions (see for example Coleman et al., 1966). This...

The gender wars, academic freedom and education

Highlights from the first 1,000 BERA Blog posts

Academics who do not adhere to a particular line on gender and transgender issues have suffered intimidation by trans activists. The people under attack are not mavericks or extremists. They are...

Let’s make education fairer

A group of colleagues from the Durham University Evidence Centre for Education (DECE) were highly commended in the 2018 BERA Public Engagement and Impact Award, for their work on making education...

Data for decanting and the hatching of life trajectories

Education provides a sequence of academic production – the Department for Education sets outcomes for each stage of education for the learning, development and care of children from birth to 18....

BERA Blog highlights from 2018

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A seasonal welcome to all our BERA Blog readers in the UK and around the world in this, our third end-of-year-highlights special edition. And what a year this has turned out to be. (I really will...

Researchers drawing on teachers’ tools: Picturebooks with migrant learners

This blog post springs from a symposium I convened at BERA Conference 2018 entitled ‘Using creative methods to explore complex topics with young participants’. The symposium reflected my...

Aspirations, expectations and rethinking outreach

‘Aspirations’ are a wonderfully simple concept. The problem is that it’s becoming increasingly clear they are of little worth in terms of understanding pathways towards higher education, as...

Arresting ‘epistemic violence’: Decolonising the national curriculum for history

A renewed call to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum has marked a shift in thinking about education and what should form the canon of curriculum content (le Grange, 2016). It has been amplified...

Longitudinal qualitative research to look at what works for children with conduct disorders

I was interviewing a teacher in a school for excluded pupils who had been providing one-to-one teaching to a child in a longitudinal study I was conducting. We were talking about the very...