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 Professional Workforce for the Early Years? Policy, practice and sector responses

Research Commission: Competing Discourses of Early Childhood Education and Care

This Seminar is the 4th in the Research Commission, Competing Discourses of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC): Tensions, Impacts and Democratic Alternatives across the UK’s four...

A Curriculum for Early Years

Research Commission: Competing Discourses of Early Childhood Education and Care

This one-day seminar was the third in a series of interactive events comprising the BERA Research Commission 2019 – 2020,  Competing Discourses of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC):...

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

Competing discourses in early childhood education and care

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...

What is ‘variation’ in early years mathematics?

As we near the end of our year-long project into what effects five- and six-year-olds’ ability to count-on when adding, here we reflect upon our journey. What led us to this topic was the recent...

BERA Research Commission 2019/2020 – Competing Discourses of Early Childhood Education and Care

The first BERA Research Commission was Competing Discourses of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC): Tensions, Impacts and Democratic Alternatives across the UK’s four jurisdictions, led by...