Halting the rise of character education in Britain

Character education has risen up the political agenda in the UK in recent years, as it has in a number of other countries. The United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Japan and Taiwan have...

BERA Blog highlights from 2019

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A seasonal ‘yo-ho-ho’ to all our BERA Blog readers here in the UK and around the world in this, our fourth end-of-year-highlights special edition. The BB continues to grow, with more special...

Aesthetic education: Recent thoughts on old problems

Aesthetic education is usually concerned with the role of arts appreciation in students’ personal development. Its advocates often pitch it in opposition to instrumentalism, but in doing so,...

General Election 2019: Where do the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems stand on education?

What can we expect from the three main UK political parties if elected to government? I have compared the education sections of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos. (All...

The success of Finnish schools: Lessons from a high-performing system

I have recently returned from Tampere University in Finland as part of an Erasmus project called Academic Adventures, and in this blog post I want to share some reflections from that week about...

Gender and sexual identities in early childhood curricula: The case of Canada

Research concerning the intersections between early childhood education and subjectivities has been ubiquitous (see for example, Olmedo & Wilkins, 2016; Ritchie, 2008); yet despite prominent...

The new Ofsted framework

Curriculum may be back in vogue, but it augments rather than replaces the standards agenda

School accountability by Progress 8: A critique of Conservative and Labour proposals

The Conservatives and Labour hold different views on the future of England’s system of school accountability by Progress 8. However, both parties’ thinking is at odds with the research...

‘Me, my selfie and I’: An exploration of children’s perceptions of social media – a PhD pilot study

Numbers of users of social media has increased dramatically in recent years with children and young people recognised as heavy adopters of this virtual social network (Richards, Caldwell, & Go,...

How technology makes us human: Cultural historical roots for design and technology education

This blog post accompanies an article by McLain, Irving-Bell, Wooff and Morrison-Love (2019), in a political climate where an ideological interpretation of knowledge (Biesta, 2014; Muller & Young,...

School readiness, early years education and neoliberal subjectivities

This symposium built upon BERA’s research commission, Competing Discourses of Early Childhood Education and Care, and critically explored why and how early childhood education and care (ECEC)...

Threshold concepts and troublesome transitions

I attended school in the county of Staffordshire, England, and can still clearly recall starting Sixth Form as being one of the most significant periods in my life. Transitioning from the General...