The BERA Blog was established in 2015 to provide research-informed content on key educational issues in an accessible manner.
The biggest mistake of the 1997–2010 Labour governments was the failure in 2004/5 to implement Mike Tomlinson’s report on the future of the secondary education curriculum and assessment. In...
Continue reading blog postIt might have been easier to identify the purpose of higher education in the early part of the 20th century, when the few students who went to university came from a narrow demographic background...
Continue reading blog postWe know that the primary timetable is overcrowded, testing is embedded in almost every year of a child’s primary schooling (Wyse et al., 2022), and expectations of what teachers must cover grow...
Continue reading blog postIn the past two or three decades there has been a fundamental shift from seeing higher education in essentially educative terms to seeing it almost exclusively in transactional terms. Young people...
Continue reading blog postWhat are we educating for in secondary education? In a world where if we want to know something we can just ‘google it’, and artificial intelligence can generate essays, presentations or...
Continue reading blog postI would like to believe that our national policymakers for primary school education seek out the relationship between policy, research and practice. I’d like to think that to achieve this they...
Continue reading blog postEducation represents no less than our vision of society, and the people in it. It represents values. How education policy is made tells us about whose values are prioritised, what sources of...
Continue reading blog postIn December 1987, Secretary of State for Education Kenneth Baker summed up the purpose of the Education Reform Bill as ‘standards, freedom and choice’. Underpinning the bill was the belief...
Continue reading blog postFeminism is a concept and a practice. As a concept feminism is polysemic, semantically contested, networked, interactive, powerful and dynamic. An important binary that has had real effects in the...
Continue reading blog post
