The gender wars, academic freedom and education

Academics who do not adhere to a particular line on gender and transgender issues have suffered intimidation by trans activists. The people under attack are not mavericks or extremists. They are...

Deconstructing the SATs process: Resistance is futile?

In April 2016, a mother voiced her concerns on the English Local Schools Network website (Secret Parent, 2016) about withdrawing her 10-year-old from the new key stage 2 SATs. Her main concern was...

Let’s make education fairer

A group of colleagues from the Durham University Evidence Centre for Education (DECE) were highly commended in the 2018 BERA Public Engagement and Impact Award, for their work on making education...

Data for decanting and the hatching of life trajectories

Education provides a sequence of academic production – the Department for Education sets outcomes for each stage of education for the learning, development and care of children from birth to 18....

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...

Aspirations, expectations and rethinking outreach

‘Aspirations’ are a wonderfully simple concept. The problem is that it’s becoming increasingly clear they are of little worth in terms of understanding pathways towards higher education, as...

In pursuit of a secure base? Education commentary in times of socio-political uncertainty

In 1973, at the beginning of the 1970s international oil crisis, and amid emergent Watergate revelations, Paul Simon sang ‘we come in the age’s most uncertain hour...’. At around the same...

Student behaviour, motivation and the potential of attachment-aware schools to redefine the landscape

The starting point for our article (Parker & Levinson, 2018) was the apparent contradiction in current government policy between an essentially top-down, ‘zero tolerance’ behaviourist model of...

Confusion, contradiction and exclusion: The problems of British values and the national curriculum in history teaching

From 2010, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition began to reassess the teaching of history in schools across the key stages of the national curriculum in England and Wales. After...

Hopes and fears: The development of a new curriculum in Wales

The future of educational research in Wales

Since 2015, ‘pioneer’ schools across Wales have been contributing to the development of a new national curriculum based on Professor Graham Donaldson’s (2015) report, Successful Futures. As...

Through adversity comes strength: Educational policy reform and developing research capacity in Wales

The future of educational research in Wales

Introducing a special issue of the BERA Blog on education in Wales, to mark the conference, ‘The future of educational research in Wales’, held in Cardiff on 14 November 2018. Education...

Struggles surrounding prison radicalisation research

Since the 9/11 attack, terrorism studies have received a great volume of attention from academics. Terrorism is not a field that is easily researched, at least at first glance, and as such it...