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Carolyn Blackburn

Reader in Interdisciplinary Practice and Research with Families

Carolyn is a Reader in Interdisciplinary Practice and Research with Families in the Centre for the Study of Practice and Culture in Education at Birmingham City University. She is also a Churchill...

SEND Crisis: A call to arms against austerity

The House of Commons Education Select Committee recently published the findings from their inquiry into special educational needs and disability (SEND). The report describes a serious failure in...

Social Justice – SIG Convenor vacancy

Call for SIG Convenor The Social Justice SIG aims to: promote dialogue on educational policies and practices at all levels in terms of supporting or inhibiting social justice.  develop an...

Birmingham: A land of Trojan horses?

Birmingham has had many ethnic communities settling among its population, leading to the city becoming ‘superdiverse’ (Rex & Moore, 1967; Vertovec, 2007). British Pakistani children are close...

Tackling educational inequality

The questions, ‘What does the empirical evidence tell us about the achievement gap?’ and ‘What is proven good practice for closing the gap in educational inequality?’, are the subject of...

Spotlight on mental health and education: New special interest group hosts inaugural conference

Over 80 delegates attended the first conference of the recently launched Mental Health, Wellbeing and Education special interest group (SIG) at the University of West London (UWL) in July. The...

The experiences of teachers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ+)

The recent protests in England outside primary schools about teaching children about the full spectrum of relationships are a significant concern (Kotecha, 2019). Schools have a duty to promote...

Unexamined privilege and schools as sites of othering: Towards an ethics of commentary and debate

Despite years of monitoring and targets, the professional workforce of education, from early years to university, remains generally unrepresentative of the wider population that it serves, in...

Manifestos, policies and practices: An equalities agenda

There is likely to be a general election soon, and this calls for a manifesto or set of policy prescriptions that are opposed to neoliberal institutions, frameworks and ideologies. In addition,...

Competing, complementary and missing discourses of social justice in early childhood education and care in England

Earlier this year the University of Manchester’s Institute of Education hosted the first of four events to support BERA’s research commission into competing discourses in early childhood...

Money is not the solution to the teacher shortage – or is it?

In England, less affluent areas have had greater difficulties in attracting qualified teachers than many other parts of the country. In coastal rural areas, which can be highly deprived, 7 per...

BERA Conference 2019 to hear of new interdisciplinary study exploring the virtues underpinning ‘British values’

Much has been written, since the introduction of the duty on schools to promote ‘fundamental British values’ in the 2014 Ofsted inspection handbook, on the rights and wrongs of using education...