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...

The battle against being educated

I have been publicly exploring the issue of disruption, violence and students’ challenging behaviour in post-school classrooms since 2000 (Lebor, 2000). Susan Wallace has also carried out...

Performative education policy and the challenges for teachers with specific learning differences

Presently there are gaps in the body of research on teachers with specific learning differences (SpLDs). Where research on the matter does exist, it tends to focus on resilience strategies in...

Promoting effective curriculum research: Linking the theoretic to the practical in FE teacher education programmes

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

Education, employment and youth: Contemporary attitudes towards post-16 and post-18 education access

Providing opportunities for young people leaving compulsory schooling to pursue world-class further and higher education is a global concern. Post-compulsory education is constructed as a panacea...

Transformational Further Education: Empowering People & Communities

Transformational Further Education: Empowering People & Communities

The Further Education in England: Transforming lives & Communities research project, is commissioned by UCU and aims to understand and provide evidence of how the further education (FE) sector is...

The transformative nature of adult working-class education and its relevance today

Transformational Further Education: Empowering People & Communities

The historical theme of adult working class education in relation to contemporary post school sector, now referred to as the Lifelong Learning Sector, has to some extent been overlooked. Since the...

Stories of Change and Transformation and in Further Education

Transformational Further Education: Empowering People & Communities

From its origins as the Mechanics’ Institutes in the 1800s, FE has served industry by providing vocational skills to adults to meet the needs of business. However from the beginning it also...

Remaking Tertiary Education

Transformational Further Education: Empowering People & Communities

The same policy options face Tertiary F&HE as face Primary and Secondary schools. They were recently presented in two lectures by Baroness Tessa Blackstone, former-Labour Higher Education...

The more qualifications you have, the less you learn – lessons from citizen science

Citizen science projects are becoming increasingly important sites for researching the learning of adults. Citizen science is identified as offering: new ways to engage in scientific research; new...

Vocationalism in Further and Higher Education

One of the most striking characteristics of the post-compulsory education sector in England is the teaching of programmes with a vocational route to work. There is a tenacious underlying...

Techno-science products for Education. What is on the horizon?

Schools are bombarded with products and courses that claim to be informed by research in Neuroscience and/or Digital Technology. Despite warnings from the OECD, the Royal Society (UK), the...