BERA blog highlights from 2017

BERA Blog end of year highlights

While the demise of 2017 will generate little tear-shedding amongst many of our readers, it has been another bumper year for the BERA Blog. Just over two-and-a-half years after its inception, the...

Problematising mediatised policy-making: Newspaper coverage of PISA emphasising quality and neglecting equity

We live in interesting times. We see global social media campaigns such as #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter and #illRideWithYou responding to social, economic and political injustices, while on the other...

Sites of resistance: Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in school, community and the academy

Schools are institutions in which racial conflict is brought into focus and can be acute. Gillborn (2008) asserts that current education policy is not designed to eliminate race inequality, but to...

Bringing policy into being through word and code

Today’s educational policy is co-produced, through policy bureaucrat’s words and technocrat’s lines of code. The global move towards digital governance and the digitising of educational...

Preventing what? The flawed assumptions at the heart of the Prevent duty

The Prevent duty (2009, 2011, 2015) is a statutory requirement upon all educational professionals to have due regard to prevent individuals being drawn into terrorism. Criticisms of the Prevent...

Telling stories: How can narrative practices better support education professionals during times of transition?

Why is identity problematic for teacher educators? Identity transformation for early-career teacher educators has been shown to be problematic in the move from ‘expert teacher’ to ‘novice...

The definition of education in the Labour party’s proposed charter

The Labour party’s proposal for creating a National Education Service could, if they come to power, fulfil a long-felt need for bringing together and supporting the disparate parts of today’s...

Making sense of education as a field of study

The study of education consists of a range of traditions with distinct origins, purposes and foci. Judge and colleagues have shown how education developed as a field of study in markedly different...

Consent education: Undoing the binary and embracing ambiguity

Over the last three years I have worked alongside diverse groups of young people, aged 13–25, to develop insight into what sexual consent might mean to them and why. I have also worked with 12...