Learning loss or learning disruption?

Covid-19, education and educational research

Alarm has been expressed about the likely impact of Covid-19 on children’s academic achievement with terms such as ‘closing the gap’, ‘learning loss’ and ‘catch up’ permeating...

The BERA Blog: Highlights of 2020

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A warm and wintery ‘welcome’ to all our readers, wherever you may be. This time last year I wished all of you a seasonal ‘yo-ho-ho’, blissfully unaware of how 2020 would play out. Today,...

Winter 2020/2021

Digital technology in education Keeping pace with innovation Research Intelligence issue 145 Just as practitioners are struggling to keep up with the onslaught of new technologies entering the...

Exclusion and the strategic leadership role of special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) in England: Planning for Covid-19 and future crises

Disproportionality (the overrepresentation of specific social groups) in school exclusion data is well documented (DfE, 2019). Similarly, time and funding pressures faced by special educational...

Rethinking class size: The complex story of impact on teaching and learning

The enduring argument over class size is one of the most contested in education. The argument is between many teachers and practitioners who feel that class size makes a big difference to teaching...

Entanglements of writing and matter: Towards less human-centred practices

Over the last decade, the humanities and social sciences have become increasingly interested in the nonhuman (animals, plants, non-living objects) as having agentic and performative capacities. By...

Curriculum integration can support the development of powerful knowledge in education

On 20th March 2015, an article published by the Independent (Garner, 2015) claimed that Finnish schools had scrapped school subjects and replaced them with topics. Ever since then Finland has been...

Only time will tell: Using temporal multimodal analysis to predict learning

By analysing the learning process, one can understand how student behaviours are related to learning outcomes. When assessing the learning process, researchers have shown multimodal learning...

Prioritising micro-level experiences of schooling: A policy prospect for addressing inequality in basic education access?

Ghanaian and Sub-Saharan African (SSA) governments are successfully implementing universal policy solutions to expand basic-school opportunities for children. Yet, a vital component of the basic...

Advancing posthumanist perspectives on technology-rich learning

Picture your favourite childhood toy. What was it? What did you learn from it? How did you know it was for you? These questions, and others like it, underpin the questions raised by posthumanist...

#BlackLivesMatter in education: How can a hashtag help us understand exclusion inequalities in English schools?

Education, #BlackLivesMatter and racial justice in the UK and beyond

The publicised deaths of Black people across the United States sparked a worldwide movement of protest against the historical inequalities and marginalisation experienced within the Black...

Cultural capital in non-White majority schools: A critical exploration of cultural ethos and pedagogy

Education, #BlackLivesMatter and racial justice in the UK and beyond

Embodied cultural capital includes the artistic, religious, social and historical inheritance of non-White students. Cultural pedagogy and ethos is defined as the institution’s ‘official’...