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.

The Association’s second decade had seen a profound change in the culture that underpinned education policy, one that by 1994 was beginning to become embedded at an operational level across all educational settings. Central to this cultural shift was the placing of the school or college firmly at the heart of a competitive marketplace, one that it would survive in through a combination of shrewd business management and local popularity, the latter increasingly defined by ‘league’ table position and Ofsted judgement.

BERA’s third decade was to see a youthful Tony Blair elected initially as Labour Leader and then as Prime Minister after a campaign framed famously by his three political priorities: “Education, education, education”, and the emergence of a public service culture of ‘targets, tests and tables’, one heavily influenced by a former University of London Institute of Education academic, Michael Barber.

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