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...

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...

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...

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)...

SEND Crisis: A call to arms against austerity

The House of Commons Education Select Committee recently published the findings from their inquiry into special educational needs and disability (SEND). The report describes a serious failure in...

Mirror Mirror on the wall: the function of data in constructing child subjectivity

Data has become an increasingly important aspect of all our lives. Huge quantities of data are collected about us and used in increasingly complex ways to impact on our lives. An advertisement for...

Wellbeing by acronym: Simplifying the complex?

Among the few shared understandings of the concept of wellbeing are that it is complex, multidimensional and eludes easy definition and measurement. As research and policy attention have gathered...

Making words stick is primary practice

The Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) is responsible for inspecting the quality of education in a range of schools and settings in England, and for reporting its findings to government....

A Curriculum for Early Years

Research Commission: Competing Discourses of Early Childhood Education and Care

Online registration has now closed. If you want to attend this event, please email conference@bera.ac.uk for details of how to register onsite.  This one-day seminar is the third in a series of...

Editorial: Practitioner research and commentary in a networked society

Practitioner research and commentary in a networked society

Over the past decade, self-published polemic on education topics has become widely disseminated through a burgeoning culture of social media, and has increasingly challenged the products of...

Synergising research in early childhood education: Creating a collaborative space between close-to-practice research and academia

Practitioner research and commentary in a networked society

Since the turn of the 21st century there has been a push for teaching to become a research-based profession in a way that is practically relevant to the classroom. The recent research report...

Competing, complementary and missing discourses of social justice in early childhood education and care in England

Earlier this year the University of Manchester’s Institute of Education hosted the first of four events to support BERA’s research commission into competing discourses in early childhood...