Learning loss or learning disruption?

Alarm has been expressed about the likely impact of Covid-19 on children’s academic achievement with terms such as ‘closing the gap’, ‘learning loss’ and ‘catch up’ permeating...

Has there really been a decline in happiness among young people in the UK?

The Children’s Society published its most recent edition of The Good Childhood Report in August (Children’s Society, 2020). Concerningly, it reported that even before Covid-19 there had been a...

The BERA Blog: Highlights of 2020

BERA Blog end of year highlights

A warm and wintery ‘welcome’ to all our readers, wherever you may be. This time last year I wished all of you a seasonal ‘yo-ho-ho’, blissfully unaware of how 2020 would play out. Today,...

Exclusion and the strategic leadership role of special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) in England: Planning for Covid-19 and future crises

Disproportionality (the overrepresentation of specific social groups) in school exclusion data is well documented (DfE, 2019). Similarly, time and funding pressures faced by special educational...

Invisible disabilities: Ableism in education

Education and higher education have always been associated with specific ways of working and presenteeism. Teachers or lecturers needed to be in the room to teach or to attend meetings and...

Exploring early years degrees and graduate employment outcomes

Degree-qualified practitioners contribute to the quality of early years education and improve children’s outcomes. However, little is known about the content and structure of early years...

Who is Australian? Textbooks continue to exclude Black, Indigenous and people of colour from Australianness

Both the explicit and implicit messages that schoolchildren receive from their textbooks matter. My research focuses on race and national belonging and how these have changed from the 1950s to the...

Great expectations dashed? Evidence, practice and implementation in education

This blog is a reflection on the recent ‘special section’ in Research Intelligence issue 144 entitled ‘How we can improve the use of research evidence (in practice)’, edited by Stephen...

National curriculum policy in Norway and Brazil

In an article recently published in the Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education, we compared how national curriculum policy, in Norway and Brazil, adopted the global logic of...