Understanding and improving the wellbeing of postgraduate taught students: A longitudinal study

Research from around the globe has highlighted that university student wellbeing is lower than that of the general adult population (see for example Adlaf et al., 2001; Larcombe et al., 2014), and...

Addressing teacher education recruitment in Wales: Two new paths to teaching

With UK nations failing to hit teacher recruitment targets, and more teachers leaving the profession, education leaders are calling out the risks this poses, such as an overworked profession...

Parent engagement in school curriculum: Whose voices get heard?

Image by Freepik School curriculum has always been a contested space where parents, teachers and policymakers expressed their often-divergent views on purposes of education. Such debates...

Identifying tensions between school readiness policy and teacher beliefs, knowledge and practice in early childhood education

This blog post is based on my recent article published in the British Educational Research Journal (Kay, 2023). Using data from semi-structured interviews with two teachers, the paper addresses...

The rise of private international schools and its impact on social justice in China

As of 2023, an estimated 6.7 million students were enrolled in about 13,600 international schools globally. Over the past decade, the global sector of international schools grew by a third, and...

Teaching Peru’s recent history of conflict in secondary schools: Exploring perspectives ‘at the margins’ and ‘from below’

For two decades between 1980 and 2000, Peru experienced a significant internal conflict, primarily involving the government and the ‘Shining Path’ terrorist group. This tragic period resulted...

Curriculum work and hermeneutics: A new paradigm for contemporary education?

Teachers’ curriculum work can be a controversial topic (see for example Priestley, 2011). It is a high-level concern for politicians, public commentators, parents and professional groups, and...

‘So I suppose they think I’m a failure’: How schools (unwittingly) marginalise white working-class families

BERA Conference 2023

This blog post relates to a qualitative research project focused on the engagement and achievement of white working-class students carried out in three comprehensive secondary schools in an inner...

BERA Bites, issue 9: What are we educating for?

BERA Bites

This BERA Bites collection started out as a seminar series in which policymakers, educational practitioners and researchers came together to discuss what we are educating for across the English...

Echoes, mirrors and the need for dissenting voices to challenge closed-door policymaking

A recent blog post in Times Higher Education warned against the harmful effects of academics retreating into ‘echo chambers’ of their own making (Brooks, 2023). It argued that educationalists...

Under surveillance?

On 30 September 2023 the Observer newspaper reported that the UK government has been keeping files on the social media activity of ‘education critics’ and ‘at least nine experts’ have been...

Mobile phone bans in schools: Impact on achievement

Initial analysis of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) suggests that mobile phone bans might help with...