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5 March 2025

By Claire Cameron, Aase Villadsen, Amelia Roberts, Jo Van Herwegen, Vivian Hill, Dominic Wyse

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is right to call for “…a national effort to tackle the epidemic of school absence so we can give all children the best start in life”, but the solutions adopted by recent successive governments, especially fining parents, have not been effective. We need a rethink in how to address attendance at school. Whether through truancy, also known as skipping school, or formal exclusion, far too many children are missing out on their right to education, with potentially lifelong consequences. As many studies show, these children are more likely to be socially disadvantaged children and those with special educational needs or mental health problems. We believe an approach based around the principles of social pedagogy offers a better way forward. Our new research highlights why this needs to start in primary school. (more…)

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18 February 2025

By Jon Swain

Within the field of education research there is a rich tradition of qualitative research that seeks to give voice to and understand the lives of children, to which my book, Negotiating Gendered Identities in Primary School: Children’s lives with their peers, is a recent addition. Published in open access, it focuses on how 10-11-year-old girls and boys experience life in their informal peer group. Based on research I carried out in two co-educational primary schools, one state and one independent, it explores the dynamics of friendships and social hierarchies, identities and how time is spent outside of lessons, including the use of social media. It interrogates how children make meanings: who they think they are, what it means to be a girl or a boy, and what forms of femininity and masculinity are most dominant. (more…)

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17 December 2024

By Rachael Levy and Jennifer Chung

‘Technology is bad for kids!’ This statement has become something of a slogan in recent years with parents, teachers, educationalists and health workers, among others, raising the alarm about the ways in which technology is deemed to be damaging children. You may have seen the recent Channel 4 programme ‘Swiped’, which removed smartphones from children in an attempt to improve child well-being. Recurring themes include concerns about harmful online content, cyberbullying and screen addiction, often resulting in the call for all children, especially young children, to be protected from the digital world as much as possible.

However, the world we live in is digital. To take the example of literacy, we know that learning to read now includes developing skills to make sense of screen texts, and learning to write now includes learning to code using programming languages. This raises challenging questions for the field of early childhood education, particularly in relation to potential tensions between the desire to offer children opportunities to develop the digital literacy skills needed to succeed in the future and the desire for them to avoid the harmful effects of technology. (more…)

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12 December 2024

By Guy Roberts-Holmes

Commercial early childhood education (ECE) digital platforms have expanded rapidly since the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus far, there has been a lack of critical research on their growth and consequences. The aims of this blog are, firstly, to open a critical space to think about the political economy of commercial education platforms and, secondly, to ask questions about their impacts upon the experiences of educators, families and children. (more…)

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17 October 2024

By Peter Moss and Pat Petrie

Imagine an IOE academic in the 2000s, committed to policy-relevant research and absorbed by the Labour government’s policy agenda for children and young people. Imagine they fall into a deep sleep in May 2010, only to awaken in October 2024. As when they’d fallen into oblivion, they find Labour in government, and expectantly ask an old friend what news of their field. Whatever happened to the Department for Children, Schools and Families? To Children’s Centres and Extended Schools? To that interesting work on social pedagogy at IOE, much of it government funded and with so much promise for children in care? Above all, whatever happened to ‘Every Child Matters’? The old friend pauses, noticing the expectancy in the questioner’s voice, then breaks the difficult news: all gone and forgotten. Our academic Rip Van Winkle is left shaken and speechless. (more…)

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17 September 2024

By Wayne Holmes

This commentary is adapted from Wayne’s contribution to the ESRC Education Research Programme event, More or less technology in the classroom – the value and purposes of technology use in schools. Watch the event recording on UCL Mediacentral.

Technologies have long been designed for use in education. However, the ‘potential’ of this EdTech, especially AI-enabled EdTech, has been frequently overstated and its limitations underexplored. In any case, while EdTech offers ‘solutions’ to a variety of educational problems, not only do they rarely actually ‘solve’ the problems that they target, it isn’t even clear whether they are the ‘right’ problems in the first place. (more…)

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6 August 2024

By Emily Ranken

At a time when one in ten primary school-age children is thought to have a probable mental health disorder, there are related concerns that opportunities for young children to engage in outdoor play and physical activity are declining, to the detriment of their mental as well as physical wellbeing. If we are to design effective interventions to address these problems, we need measures that take into account children’s own views. Unable to find an existing example of such a tool, we have created our own. We hope this new means of capturing young children’s feedback on the immediate wellbeing impacts of play interventions will be of wider utility to projects aiming to improve outcomes for children. We are keen to hear from people interested in developing the tool and related measures. (more…)

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7 June 2024

By Alice Bradbury  

This is the final in a mini-series of blog posts about primary education from the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy (HHCP) at IOE. Each post addresses key points that are included in a new HHCP briefing paper written to inform debate about education in England as we approach the general election. The four posts are:

1. In the hands of new government: the future of primary education in England
2. Children, choice and the curriculum
3. Hands on learning: a progressive pedagogy
4. Assessment in primary schools: reducing the ‘Sats effect’

Assessment plays a key role in any teacher’s work: through formative assessment, teachers understand what children can do and what they need to learn next. This guides how learning is planned and what is taught. However, the current assessment landscape in England is dominated by statutory, summative assessment, where the purpose of the assessment is not to help children learn, but to measure what they can do. This is one part of the education system which, as we in HHCP argue in our new briefing paper, needs a different approach. (more…)

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6 June 2024

By Emily Ranken

This is the third of four blog posts about primary education from the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy (HHCP) at IOE. Each post addresses key points that are included in a new HHCP briefing paper written to inform debate about education in England as we approach the general election. The four posts are:

1. In the hands of a new government: the future of primary education in England
2. Children, choice and the curriculum
3. Hands on learning: a progressive pedagogy
4. Assessment in primary schools: reducing the ‘Sats effect’

Children’s opportunities for authentic, hands-on experiences as part of their learning, such as science experiments, school trips, and ‘forest school’, are decreasing. Rising constraints on school budgets, combined with a detailed curriculum that prioritises traditional, knowledge-heavy content, means that schools are less likely to be able to provide children with these real-life, resource-intensive activities. Yet, they provide children with an essential component of primary education. (more…)

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5 June 2024

By Yana Manyukhina

This is the second of four blog posts about primary education from the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy (HHCP) at IOE. Each post addresses key points that are included in a new HHCP briefing paper written to inform debate about education in England as we approach the general election. The four posts are:

1. In the hands of a new government: the future of primary education in England.
2. Children, choice and the curriculum.
3. Hands on learning: a progressive pedagogy.
4. Assessment in primary schools: reducing the ‘Sats effect’.

Curriculum is a fundamental aspect of schooling as it dictates what children learn. Behind each curriculum is a set of significant assumptions about what we intend for our children to achieve by the time they complete their schooling. These assumptions reflect our societal values and the kind of citizens we aspire to nurture. (more…)