Accidents will happen…but why is there so little educational research on disasters?

On the 21st October 1966 forty thousand cubic metres of coal debris from a badly maintained National Coal Board waste site in Aberfan, South Wales, destroyed the Pantglas junior school below. ...

Why don’t we have Counter-factuals? We could learn a lot

Historians write counter-factuals:  brief papers that speculate about ‘what ifs?’  For example if William of Normandy had lost the battle of Hastings in 1066 what would the UK have looked...

White Working-Class Boys’ Learner Identities in Neoliberal Times

In the United Kingdom, it is widely documented both in academic circles and in the popular press that white working-class children consistently underperform at school and are less likely to attend...

Mentor education – creating an infrastructure for reducing teacher attrition

the tendencies related to teacher attrition in many countries are alarming and have huge economical as well as educational implications The quality of teaching is of concern in most countries...

Are we disconnected in world of connections?

An email message came round to the National Teaching Fellow (NTF) email list inviting us to write a blog article for BERA and I jumped at the chance. The invitation hit me at the right moment and...

Sustainable schools led teacher education that keeps the baby in the bath

With the election of the first Conservative majority government since 1997, and the re-appointment of Nicky Morgan as Secretary of State, we can confidently expect a continuation of the school led...

Using the physical environment to improve education

It might seem as if buildings, the physical location of education, are of only tangential interest to an education researcher: something that can be left to architects in the same way as the human...

Teaching Maths for Social Justice

Teaching mathematics is a social justice issue. Despite numerous calls from the mathematics education community, the curriculum in England remains stubbornly resistant to change. Too many...

Researching with young and developmentally young children: Ethical considerations, dilemmas and compromises

Highlights from the first 1,000 BERA Blog posts

One of the most challenging considerations when researching with children is the question of gaining their consent to participate in research and their perspectives on the topic under study....