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Deconstructing the SATs process: Resistance is futile?

In April 2016, a mother voiced her concerns on the English Local Schools Network website (Secret Parent, 2016) about withdrawing her 10-year-old from the new key stage 2 SATs. Her main concern was...

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...

Looking back on an event-full 2018

A year that championed educational research and its impact is now gone into the ether. We worked with our brilliant SIG convenors, partners and speakers to ply you with useful and enjoyable events...

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...

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...

The neglect of practice

Many BERA members will be very familiar with terms such as evidence-informed practice, evidence-based practice and research-engaged teaching. The recent BERA close-to-practice research project is...

In pursuit of a secure base? Education commentary in times of socio-political uncertainty

In 1973, at the beginning of the 1970s international oil crisis, and amid emergent Watergate revelations, Paul Simon sang ‘we come in the age’s most uncertain hour...’. At around the same...

Student behaviour, motivation and the potential of attachment-aware schools to redefine the landscape

The starting point for our article (Parker & Levinson, 2018) was the apparent contradiction in current government policy between an essentially top-down, ‘zero tolerance’ behaviourist model of...

Confusion, contradiction and exclusion: The problems of British values and the national curriculum in history teaching

From 2010, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition began to reassess the teaching of history in schools across the key stages of the national curriculum in England and Wales. After...

BERA Statement on Close-to-Practice Research

BERA offers this statement to serve as a shared reference-point for high quality research, conducted within diverse research traditions, that shares the central aim of making a contribution to...

Through adversity comes strength: Educational policy reform and developing research capacity in Wales

Introducing a special issue of the BERA Blog on education in Wales, to mark the conference, ‘The future of educational research in Wales’, held in Cardiff on 14 November 2018. Education...

Performative education policy and the challenges for teachers with specific learning differences

Presently there are gaps in the body of research on teachers with specific learning differences (SpLDs). Where research on the matter does exist, it tends to focus on resilience strategies in...