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...

Hopes and fears: The development of a new curriculum in Wales

The future of educational research in Wales

Since 2015, ‘pioneer’ schools across Wales have been contributing to the development of a new national curriculum based on Professor Graham Donaldson’s (2015) report, Successful Futures. As...

Phonics ‘first and fast’… but at what cost?

Reading is one of life’s profound joys. According to reading expert Maryanne Wolf, reading changes the very structure of our brain and neural pathways; the act allows us to go beyond our own...

A new approach to observing different learners’ interactive behavior and learning performance in cMOOCs

With the development of web 2.0 technology and social media, learners can share, collect, and edit content with peers or friends to create knowledge. In these social spaces, learning approaches...

Gamifying programming education in K-12

In our recent article published in the British Journal of Educational Technology (Lindberg et al 2018), we present the results of a review on how programming has been approached by K-12 curriculum...

National curriculum in England: The first 30 years, part 2

This is the second in a two-part series on the development of the national curriculum; read part 1 here. The work of the expert panel, for the most recent review of the national curriculum...

National curriculum in England: The first 30 years, part 1

For the whole of the 1970s I taught in secondary schools. (I am that old!) At that time there was no national curriculum (NC), so teachers usually decided what to teach as well as how to teach....

Grammar and creativity in the English national curriculum

In November 2017 the Times Educational Supplement (TES) published an article under the headline ‘Teaching grammar does not improve children's writing ability, research finds’ (Bloom 2017)....

Encouraging inclusion of at-risk students through co-op video games

Every day, teachers face challenges with including students who are inactive participants in the classroom. Such challenges may involve social difficulties – such as shyness, disruptive...

Linking environmental science to the curriculum for Excellence on an initial teacher training programme

The focus of Scottish initial teacher training programmes on numeracy, literacy and child development has undergone change over the last few decades, primarily due to the requirements set out in...

Physical Education External Provision in Irish primary schools

External provision is developing as a trend in schools worldwide, and physical education is no exception to this trend – see for instance New Zealand (Dyson et al 2016), the UK (Griggs 2010,...

The power of literature: Why literature teaching is about emancipation and social justice

This blog considers something that we all share – memories of reading literature – but its purpose is to promote and defend the place of egalitarian approaches to literature teaching in...