What ‘building back better’ really means for our children: Anne Longfield’s final speech as the children’s commissioner for England

On February 17 2021, Anne Longfield OBE gave her final speech as the children’s commissioner for England. Her words were a clarion cry for the UK’s children, who for the past 12 months have...

Transforming the secondary curriculum

The questions of how to design and implement secondary curricula are critical and current ones in education. Of major concern is the narrowing of the curriculum and the lack of an inclusive...

Why we need our world history teacher to be a Martian

‘In space, race doesn’t matter, nationality doesn’t matter. In space, you see the world as a globe and you don’t see the boundaries.’ Maggie Aderin Pocock, space scientist Figure 1:...

Conducting research during the pandemic using an ‘ethics of care’

The Covid-19 pandemic has created economic and social instability for many people in Britain and around the world. As such, we might consider it an experience of ‘collective trauma’, combining...

How has Covid-19 affected the way in which teacher educators engage their students with learning?

Highlights from the first 1,000 BERA Blog posts

In this blog we seek to understand the impact that the sudden and enforced move to online teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic has had on the perceptions of teacher educators in initial teacher...

Describing young people’s use of digital technology

Scarcely a month goes by without something in the media about young people’s use of digital technology. This is often framed in negative terms related to concerns about excessive ‘screen...

Access denied: Education in rural India during Covid-19

The disruptive effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are borne disproportionately by already disadvantaged social groups. When all educational institutions across India shifted to online and distance...

Doing data differently

As various studies of teachers’ lives and work have explored, using attainment data in schools goes over and above what that data are designed to do. The datafication of schooling in England and...

Silver linings: Lockdown legacies

In my November 2020 BERA Blog, ‘Reading during lockdown: Supporting vulnerable learners’, I reported on the beginnings of a small-scale research project (funded by BERA) to explore the impact...