School accountability by Progress 8: A critique of Conservative and Labour proposals

The Conservatives and Labour hold different views on the future of England’s system of school accountability by Progress 8. However, both parties’ thinking is at odds with the research...

SEND Crisis: A call to arms against austerity

The House of Commons Education Select Committee recently published the findings from their inquiry into special educational needs and disability (SEND). The report describes a serious failure in...

Multi-academy trusts in England: What drives them to grow?

Multi-academy trusts (MATs) are now a common feature of the English educational landscape. Yet numerous high-profile failures indicate that they present a substantial challenge in terms of...

Threshold concepts and troublesome transitions

I attended school in the county of Staffordshire, England, and can still clearly recall starting Sixth Form as being one of the most significant periods in my life. Transitioning from the General...

Wellbeing by acronym: Simplifying the complex?

Among the few shared understandings of the concept of wellbeing are that it is complex, multidimensional and eludes easy definition and measurement. As research and policy attention have gathered...

Birmingham: A land of Trojan horses?

Birmingham has had many ethnic communities settling among its population, leading to the city becoming ‘superdiverse’ (Rex & Moore, 1967; Vertovec, 2007). British Pakistani children are close...

Escape from the Skinner box

Now that artificial intelligence (AI) is very much in the public eye, the issue of its use in education has attracted much attention, both good and bad. Within the context of education, one...

The ethics of using pedagogical agents in intelligent tutoring systems

Recognising that learning is a social activity, intelligent tutoring systems enable learners to engage in (virtual) face-to-face social interactions with autonomous animated software characters,...

Tackling educational inequality

The questions, ‘What does the empirical evidence tell us about the achievement gap?’ and ‘What is proven good practice for closing the gap in educational inequality?’, are the subject of...

Yes, they can! Teachers and learners as language curriculum developers

In contexts in which English as a foreign language is a mandatory subject in secondary education, language learning motivation can be a challenge for teachers and ministerial curriculum...

The use of technology in education and its potential to heal liberated Iraq

While information and communication technology (ICT) has been integrated into education for the last three decades in many parts of the world, this has not been the case in Iraq. ICT was...

Editorial: Practitioner research and commentary in a networked society

Practitioner research and commentary in a networked society

Over the past decade, self-published polemic on education topics has become widely disseminated through a burgeoning culture of social media, and has increasingly challenged the products of...