BCF Curriculum Investigation Grant

The BCF Curriculum Investigation Grant is intended to support research led by schools and colleges with a focus on curriculum inquiry and investigation. The theme for the 2024-2025 grant is...

Empiricism and technical rationality: Why can’t we mean what we say?

Philosophical issues tend not to occupy a prominent place in books on learning or in accounts of research and knowledge-development. Being concealed in the research and knowledge process, they...

The BERA Guides: Critical Insights into Educational Research and Practice

Short, research-informed yet accessible introductions to key, interdisciplinary topics impacting education research and practice

Education and democracy & History of education: BERA Brian Simon Fund research reports

The research presented in this series of reports was funded by a grant from the Brian Simon fellowship fund. Held in trust by BERA, the fund was a gift from the family of Brian Simon, a leading...

Agenda for Citizenship Education (ACE)

Education and democracy & History of education: BERA Brian Simon Fund research reports

Funded by the Brian Simon fellowship grant, this research project on the topic ‘education and democracy’ focused on formulating a new ‘agenda for citizenship education’ that builds on...

Editorship of the Curriculum Journal

The opportunity BERA is looking for a team of editors to take on the editorship of the Curriculum Journal from the start of 2025. The Curriculum Journal is published by Wiley on behalf of the...

Editorial: Exploring issues in secondary subject English: Reconnecting curriculum, policy and practice

The Victorian writer, philosopher and critic, John Ruskin, once invited his readers to ‘Commiserate [with] the hapless Board School child, shut out from dreamland and poetry, and prematurely...

‘Disciplinary consciousness’ and English

What is a discipline and why does it matter? Knowing about our disciplines is more and more important given the increasingly generic demands of teaching and assessment, the proliferating ‘lethal...

Exploring issues in secondary subject English: Reconnecting curriculum, policy and practice

Evidence suggests that opportunities for students to enjoy talk, reading and writing in the subject of English are increasingly delimited in maintained secondary schools in England. The pressures...

Decline and fall? Students’ perspectives on A-level English at 16

English A-level1 is in steady decline. In England, student numbers have dropped from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023. Research involving teachers suggests that the current GCSE specifications and...

Human superpowers: Talking in class

The spoken word wields immense power. Everyday conversation is the basis of human relationships: communication underpins collaboration, the engine that facilitated the success of our species...

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better (Beckett, 1983): GCSE English students’ relationship with failure

The pressure to ‘fail better’ weighs heavy in GCSE English resit classrooms, echoing Samuel Beckett’s famous words from Worstward Ho. However, this oft-repeated mantra, stripped of its...