New teachers’ responses to Covid-19: Getting by or getting ahead?

New teachers might have been expected to experience particular difficulties in moving to remote emergency teaching in March 2020. Funded by a BERA Covid-19 small grant project, we are exploring in...

The Covid-19 pandemic and the early years workforce

The evidence is clear that motivated, knowledgeable and experienced staff are key to supporting children’s development in early years settings (see for example Melhuish, Ereky-Stevens, &...

BERA Research Commission 2021/22 – A teacher and youth co-created manifesto for Education for Environmental Sustainability (EfES) from the four jurisdictions of the UK

The primary objective of this commission was to co-create a manifesto for Education for Environmental Sustainability (EfES) in secondary education in the UK.  To achieve this, the commission...

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,...

Do private schools make a difference to mental health?

Parents send their children to private schools for a range of reasons, and we know that British private schools are successful in terms of academic attainment and that their alumni tend to go on...

Education: An academic discipline or a field?

What is the problem? Education research has periodically been sharply criticised for being weak in comparison with research from other disciplines. Some of this criticism has implied, or...

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

The structural inequalities faced by Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities have been deepened by a decade of austerity. We are in the midst of a global pandemic and, following yet further...

SERA Conference 2020

To mark the 2020 conference SERA has organised three online events on Monday 16th, Wednesday 18th and Thursday 19th November 2020.  The theme for the week of events is:  Education and...

Curricular breadth in Scottish secondary schools: Access and inequality

Curriculum policy in many countries in the period since the 1960s has aimed to provide a broad, liberal programme to all students as a route into common citizenship. My recent paper (Paterson,...

Justifying curricular enrichment in performative times

Much has been written about the tendency to narrow the curriculum to focus on what counts in measurable terms in testing times. This effect is felt most acutely in schools servicing disadvantaged...

#BlackLivesMatter in education

The sickening death of African-American George Floyd by suffocation at the hands of a White-American policeman has justifiably fuelled the force of the #BlackLivesMatter movement across the world....

Why do school exclusion rates continue to rise in England?

Children and young people excluded from school for poor behaviour have lower than average educational outcomes. They are more likely to experience ‘deep exclusion’ (Levitas et al., 2007), with...