March Of The Four Year Olds

On 25th April 2019 More than a Score organised a march from Parliament Square to 10 Downing Street to hand in a petition calling for a halt to statutory tests for four-year-olds. The petition had...

Five ways in which Edu-exit was the test run for Brexit

Brexit is the current and incredibly dangerous version of the ongoing and deeply rooted restructuring of UK health, welfare, security, and education services. Comparing the UK government reforms...

The Future of Educational Research in Wales

This report, published by BERA in partnership with the Welsh Government, presents the proceedings of and lessons from the Future of Educational Research in Wales conference. Held in Cardiff on 14...

Changing culture, changing early childhood curriculum in China

School-based curriculum development (SBCD) has been advocated in order to enhance the quality of early childhood education within the context of modernisation and globalisation (Li, 2005)....

BERA Bites, issue 3: Innovative methods for educational research

The BERA Bites series presents selected articles from the BERA Blog on key topics in education, presented in an easily printable and digestible format to serve as teaching and learning resources...

BERA Blog highlights from 2018

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A seasonal welcome to all our BERA Blog readers in the UK and around the world in this, our third end-of-year-highlights special edition. And what a year this has turned out to be. (I really will...

Researchers drawing on teachers’ tools: Picturebooks with migrant learners

This blog post springs from a symposium I convened at BERA Conference 2018 entitled ‘Using creative methods to explore complex topics with young participants’. The symposium reflected my...

Optimising support for children with ADHD in schools

The school environment can be particularly challenging for children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Pupils diagnosed with ADHD are typically restless, act without thinking...

A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Young children and multimodal learning with tablets

It has become increasingly apparent that being literate is a fundamental skill for citizens of the 21st century, just as it was in previous times, but also that new conceptualisations of what it...

Supporting early-childhood teachers with integrating a humanoid robot to enhance learning

Anthropomorphic robots are increasingly being used as a technology in early childhood settings, and they have been found to enhance social interaction (Tanaka, Cicourel & Movellan, 2007), support...

Phonics ‘first and fast’… but at what cost?

Reading is one of life’s profound joys. According to reading expert Maryanne Wolf, reading changes the very structure of our brain and neural pathways; the act allows us to go beyond our own...

To touch or not to touch? Early childhood educators’ beliefs about using touchscreen technologies with our youngest children

The use of touchscreen technologies in the early years has grown, despite strong recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) for children under the age of two to have no...