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

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...

Supporting quiet, shy or anxious Black, Asian and minority ethnic children with English as an additional language in the early years

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

Many articles that have been written in relation to the Black Lives Matter agenda, state that education is key to improving Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) children’s life chances...

Employer engagement with schools in Wales

Many young people leaving school will at some point enter employment. It is, therefore, important to examine how employers engage with the future workforce within secondary schools. Businesses may...

#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....

Curriculum reform and inequality: The challenges facing Wales

Re‐educating the nation? The development of a new curriculum for Wales

Wales is in the process of undertaking a major overhaul of its national curriculum. Until recently, the curriculum largely resembled that put in place by the 1988 Education Reform Act. The new...

Re‐educating the nation? The development of a new curriculum for Wales

This series of blogs summarises new research featured in a special issue of the Curriculum Journal  (published simultaneously in English and Welsh), which explores the many issues that arise...

School transition, socioeconomic inequalities in wellbeing and the Covid-19 pandemic

Covid-19, education and educational research

Children’s education and wellbeing are profoundly influenced by the circumstances into which they are born. Being from a wealthier family is associated with a range of positive outcomes. Poverty...

Time for educational researchers to take their place in the sun?

Covid-19, education and educational research

As recent posts on the BERA Blog have demonstrated, in the quiet chaos of lockdown a range of taken-for-granted assumptions (Courtney et al., 2020), competencies (Zhou & Wolstencroft, 2020) and...

Tensions in current curriculum reform and the development of teachers’ professional autonomy

Re‐educating the nation? The development of a new curriculum for Wales

Current curriculum reform in Wales offers the chance for teachers to have greater freedom in developing pedagogical approaches that meet the needs of their pupils. The Successful Futures report...