Preparing children for the future: Robot programming in early childhood education

The field of early childhood education (ECE) has seen a rise in the use of programmable robotics to introduce coding, computational thinking (CT), and sequencing ability to young learners. While...

BERA Bites, issue 8: Toward a digital future of curriculum, pedagogy & assessment

BERA Bites

In the last three decades, digital technologies have become an integral part of our lives, societies and education systems worldwide. The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns since early...

Researching ethnicity and the early years workforce: The need for reflexivity

In July 2022, we published a BERA report on ethnicity and the early years (EY) workforce in maintained nursery schools in England (Sakr et al., 2022). We offered quantitative research based on a...

Visibility of structural injustice in early childhood degrees

The Early Childhood Studies Degrees Network advocates for a graduate-led workforce that is competent in leadership and in promoting social justice. The recently revised QAA sector benchmark for...

Being a young and highly educated woman: My positionality in doing qualitative educational research in China

This blog post provides two examples of how my researcher positionality intersects with those of participants, and challenges traditional stereotyped expectations of power relations in Chinese...

Why is the Trump Baby so dangerous for children’s citizenship?

A balloon depicting President Donald Trump in the guise of a baby was inflated in Parliament Square in London on 13 July 2018. As the central image of the street protests during Trump’s visit to...

Call for papers: What place for activism in, for and as education?

A proposed special issue of the British Educational Research Journal

Spaces for activism in early years initial teacher education in England

Practices of initial teacher education (ITE) are inevitably impacted by a range of influential discourses, including those endorsed by central government and those emerging from the values,...

Ethnicity and the early years workforce in maintained nursery schools across England

In this blog post, Mona Sakr and Shaddai Tembo recap key points from their recent BERA event on race and ethnicity in the early years workforce in maintained nursery schools in England. As part...

‘Learning for All’

BERA is funding six new small grants in 2022/23 under the title “Learning for all”. These grants support projects which examine educational provision in its widest sense that seeks to provide...

‘Why won’t you leave?’ The question we should be asking nursery staff who choose to stay in the profession

Workforce statistics in the field of early years education and childcare (EYEC) are frequently tendered as proof of how the UK system of nursery recruitment and retention is flawed, failing or...

Framing research: Critical Discourse Studies and early childhood educational research

BERA Early Career Researcher Network Symposium Series 2022

During the process of undertaking doctoral research, it is important to acknowledge the research journey and emphasise your rationale for conducting that specific research project. This relates to...