Activism, autonomy and identities: Stories from early childhood educators

In pre-Covid England, early childhood education and care (ECEC) was already in a state of uncertainty. A maelstrom of structural conditions and an onslaught of initiatives had manifested as...

Birth to three matters for schools: Attachment theory and readiness to learn

The role of attachment theory in education has frequently been questioned, as typified in the recent Twitter exchange on ‘edutwitter’ below. Figure 1: Anonymised screenshot of a tweet and...

Framing research: Participatory research approaches in early years education

Framing research: Theories, concepts and reflexivity in educational research

On 14 February 2020, at the BERA ECR Network Symposium, my presentation focussed on participatory research in early childhood education. Having worked for a number of years in an early childhood...

BERA joins call to cancel the introduction of Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) in the Autumn term

BERA President Dominic Wyse is one of the co-signatories to an open letter that calls upon the Government to abandon its plan to introduce the reception baseline assessment into primary schools in...

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....