A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Young children and multimodal learning with tablets

It has become increasingly apparent that being literate is a fundamental skill for citizens of the 21st century, just as it was in previous times, but also that new conceptualisations of what it...

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...

A new tool to help teachers as digital learning designers

We began with a sense of mission: to support teachers in making effective use of learning technologies. Educational research has done little so far to help teachers into the digital age; policy...

Phonics ‘first and fast’… but at what cost?

Reading is one of life’s profound joys. According to reading expert Maryanne Wolf, reading changes the very structure of our brain and neural pathways; the act allows us to go beyond our own...

Gamifying programming education in K-12

In our recent article published in the British Journal of Educational Technology (Lindberg et al 2018), we present the results of a review on how programming has been approached by K-12 curriculum...

National curriculum in England: The first 30 years, part 2

This is the second in a two-part series on the development of the national curriculum; read part 1 here. The work of the expert panel, for the most recent review of the national curriculum...

National curriculum in England: The first 30 years, part 1

For the whole of the 1970s I taught in secondary schools. (I am that old!) At that time there was no national curriculum (NC), so teachers usually decided what to teach as well as how to teach....

Does bias in secondary school track recommendations change over time?

Tracked educational systems, such as many European systems for secondary education, are frequently associated with higher levels of educational inequity compared with comprehensive systems....

Young children’s perceptions of due process in schools’ disciplinary procedures

‘It’s not fair!’ is a common phrase heard in schools. But what is ‘fair’ in the eyes of pupils? Our recently published study in the British Educational Research Journal explored how...