Early years as a career? Policy, practice and professionalism 2003-2017

In March 2017, the long-awaited Early Years Workforce Strategy for England was published by the DfE. It aims to put in place a number of measures to address some of the difficulties currently...

Giving a Voice to Mothers

My work on the Parenting chapter of the BERA/ TACTYC Review of the Early Years Literature triggered some questions that I felt compelled to further investigate. The literature that I accessed...

Play and Pedagogy

Carrying out the research for the section on Play and Pedagogy was a pleasure. This was because the field of play scholarship is extensive, international, multi-disciplinary and progressive in...

Are we all ready in 2017?

The formalisation process which the review shows has been happening in Early Childhood Education, particularly since 2010, has moved into a new phase in 2016-17. The OECD has been considering a...

Writing a world-leading (four star) publication

Highlights from the first 1,000 BERA Blog posts

The idea that research could be described as ‘4*’ came from the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF). Four-star research is 'world-leading in terms of originality, significance and...

Responding to disadvantage within English schools: a collaborative future

For the last ten years, researchers in the Centre for Equity in Education have been asking why, despite continuous reforms, the most vulnerable children and young people in the English school...

Assessing the manifesto commitments on assessment: progress, improved accountability, or continuous assessment

Educationists and teachers have long complained of policy overload, particularly during the Gove years when schools suffered a ‘policy epidemic’ with changes to assessment and the...

The politics of mental wellbeing and education

Social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB) in schools has, over the past decade, emerged as part of a broader mental health agenda, shaped and driven through versions of childhood located in notions of...

The Matthew effect at election time

The Matthew effect is an expression that has been coined to summarise the parable of the talents found in Matthew’s gospel (Matthew 25:14-30), which suggests that the rich get richer while the...