As part of our 50th anniversary celebrations, BERA has collected together a set of 50 landmark studies that have had a significant impact on educational policy, practice, research methodology and/or theory over the past 50 years.

BERA’s first decade had begun with a miners’ strike, the three day week and two barely conclusive general elections; its second began in an equally challenging context, and in a year that George Orwell had rendered synonymous with the idea of an over-bearing government that victimises innocent people and which will stop at nothing to achieve its ends.

For the educational research community, the launch of the first Research Assessment Exercise in 1986 signalled that the ‘performance’ focused culture that would dominate the decades ahead, especially in England, would be as significant in Higher Education as it was to prove elsewhere across the educational landscape.

Read more about the studies chosen from the second decade of BERA’s history in the document below.