Festive felicitations and seasonal salutations to all our readers, authors, curators and guest editors around the globe. Reflecting on yet another outstanding year for the BERA Blog, we celebrate the creativity, insight, passion and enthusiasm that have cemented the BB’s reputation as one of the leading international blogs on educational research. Now, in its ninth year (10th anniversary celebrations are being planned as I write this!), and with an archive of more than 1,650 blog posts, this blog continues to inspire, inform, provoke and engage researchers, practitioners, policymakers, educational leaders and students in cutting-edge educational research. This year alone, the BB has published 277 blog posts and attracted more than 250,000 page views from readers in 210 of the 230 countries and territories that Google Analytics gathers data on.

This year’s symphony of scholarship, as diverse as ever, includes standout pieces on:

• Academics’ perspectives on students’ use of ChatGPT: Contain constrain or embrace the genie
• Does educational research lack discipline?
• Reframing climate change education
• ‘Read The Trial by Kafka for a good analogy’: Teacher Educator experiences of DfE accreditation in England
• Race, racism and hope
• Breaking barriers: The inspirational journeys of disabled schoolteachers
• Under surveillance?
• What are educational podcasts?
• Empiricism and technical rationality: Why can’t we mean what we say?
• How can conspiracy theories be combatted in schools?
• Food poverty among students: What is the role of universities?
• Mobile phone bans in schools: Impact on achievement
• School inspection: Unconscionable acts of reason?
• Engaging low-income families in education research: An interdisciplinary exploratory study

Not surprisingly, it has been another busy year for our editorial team. Over the past 12 months we have published eight special issues on:

• Unpacking the complexities and challenges of education in Northern Ireland
• Education and the climate crisis: A curriculum for sustainability
• Exploring issues in secondary subject English: Reconnecting curriculum, policy and practice
• Doing cynefin: Exploring ideas on belonging, connectedness and community in the Curriculum for Wales
• The ECR journey: From inspiration to impact
• A global goal but local challenges: Perspectives on education in the Global South
• Researching gender and sexuality
• Practitioner research in mathematics education

Three more collections of the widely welcomed BERA Bites teaching resources have also been published:

• BERA Bites, issue 9: What are we educating for?
• BERA Bites, issue 10: Employability education – learning from the present: A cross-sector view
• BERA Bites, issue 11: Developing your early career researcher profile & skillset

Our ongoing BERA Blog series on Artificial Intelligence continues to generate hot-off-the-press content with too many blog posts to highlight here, so please take a look at this amazing series. This year, we have added two more BERA Blog series to the series collection as a whole:

• BERA Conference 2024 and WERA Focal Meeting
• BERA Early Career Researcher Network Symposium Series 2023

And with a Research Excellence Framework 2029 call for contributions (deadline: 1 May 2025) we are confident this will produce BERA Blog bounty for years to come.

But what other magnificent missives have migrated into our inbox this year?

As uncertainty grips so many of us, it is unsurprising that the BB attracted blog posts on wellbeing and mental health from Dimitra Hartas; and from Peter Wolstencroft and Lisa Simmons among many others. More surprising, perhaps, were captivating contributions on this topic informed by the Arts from Karen Fox and Carolyn Hopkins; and from Lisa Stephenson, Angela Colvert and Rachel Lofthouse. Climate change and sustainability have also inspired thundering contributions from Sarah Clayton; Stephen Scoffham; Anna Ridgewell; Cait Talbot-Landers and Bethan Garrett; and Alicia Blanco-Bayo, Lynn Kearney and Silvia Cont.  

Across the four nations, the topic of the curriculum continues to inspire carefully crafted pieces including these from: Steven Hodge; Max Antony-Newman; Rhianna Murphy; and Michelle Thomason and Warren Kidd. There are also terrific blog posts on the hidden curriculum from Jane Dorian; and from Helen Young and Lee Jerome. And for those interested in language provision in UK further education, don’t miss this wonderful piece from Min-Chen Liu.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion generated more blog posts than ever this year, with just some of the many gems coming from Denise Miller; John Armstrong and Alice Sullivan; Penny Rabiger; with two blog posts specifically on the degree-awarding gap from Ratha Perumal, Deborah Husbands, Orkun Yetkili, Amina Razak and Ayo Mansaray; and from Josephine Gabi, Alison Braddock, Claire Brown, Denise Miller, Gwenda Mynott, Melissa Jacobi, Pallavi Banerjee, Karen Kenny and Andrew Rawson. Riveting reflections on special educational needs and disabilities came from Katie Brown; and from Alan Marsh, Peter Gray and Brahm Norwich.

We have seen more articles than ever on research methodology, including these from Sharon Smith, Neetha Joy and Julia Barnes; Warren Kidd, Anastasia Misirli and Vassilis Komis; Elizabet Kaitell; Olanrewaju Zaid and Mohammed Abdullahi; Verity Jones, Luci Gorell Barnes, Malcolm Richards, Tessa Podpadec, Sarah Whitehouse, Justin Vafadari and Chris Pawson; and from Kaidong Guo, Hanrui Li and Jiayi Cai. In addition to our ongoing BERA Blog series on AI, engaging explorations on educational technology also came from Steve Griffiths; Gabriella Rodolico and Lavinia Hirsu; Stefan Kucharaczyk; and from Carly Waterhouse.

2024 witnessed the launch of the BERA Teacher Network and BB readers are in for a treat with the following contributions from Beverley McCormick; Helen Foster-Collins; Ibtisam Al-Wardi; Emily Oxley and Melissa Bond; Uzma Asif; and from Nashid Nigar and Alex Kostogriz. And there is a powerful blog post on close-to-practice research from Zongyi Deng. Leadership and governance produced a foci flurry with memorable pieces from Karen Healey; and from Lewis Fogarty; and there were some terrific collaborative contributions on this topic from Mark Innes, Lisa Murtagh and Elizabeth Gregory; Joanne Doherty and Karen Healey; and from Qian Liu and Calum Davey.

The state of teacher education provoked crisp commentaries from Ann MacPhail and Eline Vanassche; Alison Glover and Sarah Stewart; Simon Lam; Tony Adams; Lisa Murtagh; Jemima Davey and Jane Chambers; Lauren Hammond, Nicola Walshe and Mary Fargher; and  from Donna Dawkins, Helen Carr, Ruth Till and Sandy Wilkinson. Early childhood education spawned fresh focus from Jennifer Robson; Louise Kay; and from Thomas Chambers. And there are some thoughtful takes on student voice from Grace Cardiff; James Helbert; and from Kate Wall, Amy Hana, William Quirke, Nova Lauder-Scott, Kathryn McCrorie and Rebekah Sims.

The Early Career Researcher Network, once again, has provided a constant array of BB posts all year and it is not possible, sadly, to include all of those in this year’s round-up; but I would strongly encourage everyone to visit this community to get a sense of the volume of writing, initiatives and events that colleagues are producing. That said, I would like to draw special attention to the following blog posts from Ruth Graham; Lucy Robinson; Estelia Bórquez Sánchez; and this wonderful blog post on PhD Mothers by Tanya O’Reilly, Sharon Smith and Winne Wong.

Creating edited highlights is always a challenge, as it means not being able to showcase the work of all of our wonderful authors. However, as we conclude this year’s round-up, I want to take a moment to acknowledge some other outstanding contributions from Andrian Simpson on experimental knowledge for policy and practice; Gideon Kwasi Animah on the decline of basic education in Ghana; Audrone Zonyte and Jessica Iyamu on the impact of a cancer diagnosis on a child’s educational journey; Verity Jones and Christopher Bear on ethical citizenship and young people’s food choices; Fatima Mohamed Ali, Claire Neaves, Arathi Sriprakash, Claire Stewart-Hall and Alice Willatt who write about the geographic production of injustices in primary school education in the city of Bristol; and finally a wonderful piece from Ben Lohmeyer on school bullying and the hierarchical nature of relationships in schools.

As always, we welcome future contributions from teachers, practitioners, academics, policymakers and all who have a stake in lifelong learning. While we continue to attract writers from the four nations of the UK, we also welcome contributions from all parts of the globe. If you have an idea for a future blog post, please contact members of our editorial team. The BERA Blog is open to anyone to make a submission, and our editorial team looks forward to working with an even more diverse group of contributors next year. Our downloadable BERA Bites teaching resources continue to grow in popularity, as do our BERA Blog special issues, with more issues planned for the coming year. If you would like to curate one of either of these collections, please contact a member of the BB’s editorial team or BERA’s Acting Publications Manager, Claire Castle.

We hope you have enjoyed this annual BB round-up and we are sorry – particularly to the authors whose work could not be included here – that we can’t cover all of the many themes and blog posts that the blog has engaged with over the past 12 months. However, we do hope that this overview has given you some sense of the diversity, depth and impact of the work we publish.

A huge thanks from me to our wonderful BERA Blog co-editors Alison Fox, Barbara Skinner, Naomi Flynn, Kathryn Spicksley, Elizabeth Rushton and Jennifer Agbaire (not least for putting up with me!). Massive thanks too to BERA’s Publications Manager Hannah Marston and Acting Publications Manager Claire Castle; BERA’s CEO Nick Johnson (for dreaming up the BERA Blog in the first place), and everyone in the BERA office for their work supporting the BB, including Paru Rai for creating the BERA Blog NEWSLETTER, which has been so instrumental, this year, in increasing the optics that the BB has generated these past 12 months.

Most of all, though, we would like to thank all our authors – your creativity, inspiration and patience lie behind the success story that the BERA Blog has become. We wish all our readers and authors a safe, joyous and relaxing festive season, and let us hope that 2025 brings happier times to one and all.