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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...

Forget me not? LGBTIQ+ representation and rights in education

In the film 120 Beats Per Minute, which depicts the work of Act UP Paris during the AIDS epidemic in France in the 1990s, activists perform a nonviolent instance of direct action: they enter a...

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...

Can Swedish images of engineering help UK universities widen participation in engineering degrees?

Although recruitment to undergraduate degrees in engineering in the UK has risen slightly in recent years, concerns remain. Last year, Engineering UK predicted an ongoing 20,000+ shortfall in...

The educational implications of Lionel Shriver’s attack on diversity ‘quotas’

‘[I]f an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published,...

The social categories of gender, race, dis-ability, intelligence, sexuality and class in relation to education

There have recently been calls to adopt approaches to the study of the social world that deny the need to address ontological and epistemological issues. Advocates for these approaches give the...

LGBT+ inclusion in schools

In this blog I summarise key evidence from Stonewall’s latest School Report (Bradlow et al, 2017), a study of over 3,700 lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) young people across Britain aged...

‘The Talk’ – a play to get adults talking about relationship and sex education

A child puts a question in an anonymous box. What happens next? In 2017, Justine Greening, former secretary of state for education, announced that relationships and sex education (RSE) would be...

Consent education: Undoing the binary and embracing ambiguity

Over the last three years I have worked alongside diverse groups of young people, aged 13–25, to develop insight into what sexual consent might mean to them and why. I have also worked with 12...

Setting and the academic underachievement of white working class boys

The under-achievement of white working class boys in England is well documented. They are the lowest academic achievers at the age of 16 for any socio-economic class grouping (Sutton Trust, 2016),...

Why we all need liberating from education’s gender war

Statistics released last week show that almost half of all young people in the UK enter higher education. But some groups are still far more likely to go on to university than others.[1] Whereas...

Gender-related Violence (GRV) and Young People: Critical Responses in Research and Practice

GRV is a continuing issue in the lives of young people. Recent events include reporting widespread harassment in schools (Women and Equalities Report, 2016), the continued refusal to make PSHE...