We are delighted to announce two exceptional contributions as the joint winners of our Public Impact award. They are:

• University of Kent’s Centre for Child Protection (CCP) –  Keeping Children Safe: Advancing Child Protection Pedagogy, Awareness and Practice through Innovative Simulations
• University of  Oxford’s Teacher Education and Professional Learning Group – The Reform of Initial Teacher Education in Wales

Both teams demonstrated significant and sustained impact for their research and practice in the wider education community.

University of Kent’s Centre for Child Protection (CCP) was founded as an inter-professional Centre of Excellence, starting their impact developing two simulation suites. First, the ‘Rosie Suite’ which provides immersive training tools designed to improve knowledge and practice with professionals, parents and young people around complex child protection issues including sexual abuse, neglect and work within the family courts. Second, a ‘Grooming Suite’ designed to tackle extremism, radicalisation, exploitation, grooming, gangs, knife crime and internet safety across the UK with professionals and adolescents. These simulations are designed and directly used with young people. Over 6,000 professionals gained knowledge about preventing young people from being radicalised, benefitting thousands of children and over 14,000 social workers improved their courtroom skills by 2020, enabling them to represent abused children more effectively. 

The Centre’s work has been recognised in awards and funding received from UNICEF and the UK Home Office, Kent Police and the Lawn Tennis Association.

The team is currently led by Dr Tracee Green who receives this award alongside her colleagues Professor Jane Reeves, Professor David Shemmings, Vanisha Jassal, Emma Soutar, Dr Aravinda Kosoraju, and Isobel Drew.

University of Oxford’s Teacher Education and Professional Learning Group have used a research-based approach which has profoundly influenced the radical re-conceptualisation and practices of initial teacher education (ITE) across Wales. These reforms have shaped the experiences of all trainee teachers in Wales, and have had a major impact on hundreds of participating schools and their partner universities. In both schools and HEIs there is now a significantly greater emphasis on increasing capacity to undertake and use research. Members of the team developed a New Criteria that insisted that all ITE ‘should be based on learning that is both rigorously practical and intellectually challenging at the same time’. New legislation made the Criteria mandatory and established a Teacher Education Accreditation Board (TEAB). The new Criteria required Lead Schools to accept ITE as a core responsibility and universities to assume a clearer role in making available knowledge that is not always accessible in schools: knowledge from research, from theory and from good practice internationally. In 2020, Estyn aligned its inspection frameworks to the new Criteria, as the Chief Inspector of Education and Training in Wales notes ‘often using the language of the Criteria and its vision, to support key concepts’. 

The team receiving the award are John Furlong, Katharine Burn, Hazel Hagger and Trevor Mutton.