BERA Research Commission 2018/2020 – Competing Discourses of Early Childhood Education and Care

Following the recent call for proposals, we are delighted to announce the first award for a Research Commission to run in 2019. Competing Discourses of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC):...

Closing the gap in access to free ‘universal’ early education: What affects participation among low-income families?

For over a decade, all children in England have been entitled to free government-funded early education and care from the term after they turn three. One of the aims of this policy is to close the...

Using tablets in free play: The implementation of the digital play framework in Greece

The integration of technology in the early years of education has followed a rocky path, with many obstacles to overcome. Together with research around the use of new technologies by young...

A posthumanist, materialist perspective on artmaking processes may shed a new light on the practices of social inclusion and exclusion in early years settings

Posthumanist approaches to educational research are on the rise. Such approaches reflect our understanding that the ecological aspect of our social interactions, the material and the objects...

Writing and iPads in the early years classroom

In a recent research project I was involved in, ‘Mobile Devices in Early Learning’ (Gray et al 2017), a teacher, when discussing children’s writing, told me,   ‘The iPad has...

Challenging the evidence on the new baseline test in reception

In this blog, the authors of the BERA report A baseline without basis: The validity and utility of the proposed reception baseline assessment in England preview the findings of their research....

Child-friendly research in the early years

Highlights from the first 1,000 BERA Blog posts

This article is part of the BERA Blog special issue ‘Researching the Curriculum in schools and colleges: Practice, Professionalism and Innovation’ (read more). How can the curriculum be...

The making of the RE-searchers approach: Close-to-practice theorisation and conceptualisation

This article is part of the BERA Blog special issue ‘Researching the Curriculum in schools and colleges: Practice, Professionalism and Innovation’ (read more). This is the tale of two...

‘The Talk’ – a play to get adults talking about relationship and sex education

A child puts a question in an anonymous box. What happens next? In 2017, Justine Greening, former secretary of state for education, announced that relationships and sex education (RSE) would be...

Bold beginnings or black holes? The encroachment of summative assessment into the reception curriculum

Black holes themselves are invisible against the backdrop of space. We only become aware of their presence as they begin to drag in objects around them, warping the very fabric of the universe....

Effectively deploying teaching assistants to support pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND)

This blog draws on an important piece of research published by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in England in 2015: Making the Best use of Teaching Assistants (Sharples, Webster and...

Rethinking reasons behind lower educational outcomes of looked after children

The lower educational attainment of looked after children compared with their peers not in care has long been the subject of interest and research. The dominant position is that the reason behind...