Bubble, toil and trouble: School leadership as Shakespearean tragedy in and after Covid-19

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the witches exacerbate divisions, push ambition through brute force, hierarchy and power; their interventions end in the wicked destruction of leadership potential and...

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...

How has Covid-19 affected the way in which teacher educators engage their students with learning?

Highlights from the first 1,000 BERA Blog posts

In this blog we seek to understand the impact that the sudden and enforced move to online teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic has had on the perceptions of teacher educators in initial teacher...

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...

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

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

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...