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21 January 2025

By Aine McAllister

Highly skilled refugees and asylum seekers encounter multifaceted barriers to accessing postgraduate study in UK higher education. These include wider societal and structural barriers as well as those specific to university entry. Often, the latter is a twofold barrier: to access at all, and to access commensurate with existing qualifications, professional experience and achievements. (more…)

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26 November 2024

By Veronica Osorio Calderon and Mukdarut Bangpan

The growth of Evidence-Informed Decision-Making (EIDM)

Evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) is the idea that decisions, particularly in policy, should be based on the best available research, along with other factors like public opinion, costs and practicality. As an approach, it aims to make decision-making more systematic and transparent by using a structured way of identifying and applying research evidence in policies.

EIDM has gained significant traction in recent years. This was especially clear at the Global Evidence Summit in Prague in September, which brought together 1,800 attendees to discuss the role of evidence in policymaking. Just shortly afterwards, UK Research and Innovation and the Wellcome Trust committed approximately £56.5 million to further EIDM, globally. This latest example of funding to support EIDM is dedicated to advancing “living evidence” initiatives and, specifically, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance evidence use in policymaking. (more…)

Credit: Phil Meech for IOE.

19 November 2024

By Bernie Munoz-Chereau

This commentary is adapted from Bernie’s contribution to the ESRC Education Research Programme event, ‘Democratic decision-making in English education: whose voices count?’ You can watch the event recording on UCL Mediacentral.

Imagine for one moment that you are subjected to the visit of a team of inspectors. They will come to your workplace at any time after one to three days of giving notice. When they arrive, they will spend a couple of days collecting information (i.e. observations of your performance, interviews with your colleagues and/or ‘service users’, institutional data, etc.). Then, they will use the evidence they have gathered to rate the quality of your performance, which will first be communicated to you in a meeting with you and your team, and then reiterated in a written report a few weeks later. This report will identify the name of your organisation and, once published, will be publicly available for anyone in the world with access to the Internet.

If the inspectors conclude your organisation is doing a good job, new opportunities may open up for you as its leader, such as taking on more responsibility, career progression, and even training those new in your sector and profession. If, on the contrary, the inspectors conclude the performance of the organisation you lead is poor, a spiral of decline might follow. In the worst-case scenario, your institution might be closed or taken over. Colleagues might move to other jobs, while, for those who remain, there might be fewer resources to work with.

Within England’s schools system, these latter risks are very real following a poor outcome from an inspection by Ofsted. (more…)

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7 November 2024

By Ann-Marie Hunter, Elin Arfon, and Zhu Hua

Overview

One of the aims of the UK government’s current curriculum and assessment review is to ‘break down barriers to education’. Our research within the NCLE Language Hubs programme contributes to this discussion by exploring pupils’ access to languages.

We found that policy decisions made at the school level can significantly boost the uptake of languages at GCSE – but this can come at the expense of inclusion. We suggest that this tension is driven by accountability measures and other constraints that shape schools’ approaches, leading them to select pupils to study a language who have high achievement in other subjects like maths and English. We hope our research can contribute to positive action at the national and school level to address this concerning dynamic. (more…)

Li Wei, Director and Dean of IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, at the launch event for Punnett Hall. He stands in front of a slide with a picture of Margaret Punnett and the text “IOE Events”. Credit: IOE Communications.

22 October 2024

By Georgina Brewis

As IOE celebrates one of its founding leaders, Margaret Punnett, in the naming of its space, Georgina Brewis, Professor of Social History, reflects on the path of pioneering women in the early 1900s and their recognition in the fabric of university campuses today.

Margaret Punnett (1867–1946) was born in Lincolnshire in 1867. She was born just at the right time for middle-class women to receive a better education than their mothers – she was educated at South Hampstead High School and went on to take a University of London BA in German and Mathematics in 1889. Again, this was good timing, as the University had only opened its degrees to women in 1878. (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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24 September 2024

By John White

‘Major surgery, not sticking plasters.’ What Keir Starmer said recently about NHS reforms applies also to school education in England. For nearly 40 years we have been blighted by a National Curriculum whose main rationale is as the central pillar of a selective system as indefensible as the eugenics-based binary system of the post-war years but all the more effective for being less visible. (more…)

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10 September 2024

By Joseph Mintz

Government policy for the schools system in England has moved away from using the term ‘differentiation’, replacing it with what they have called ‘adaptive teaching’. This is an idiosyncratic term in this context, and it seems that by adaptive teaching the Government means to refer to an emphasis on direct instruction and mastery learning. I argue here that this shift risks the individual learning needs of children with special educational needs being ignored, and that this has not been given enough attention in policy, practice or teacher education. (more…)

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9 July 2024

By John Yandell

This commentary is adapted from John’s contribution to the ESRC Education Research Programme event, ‘Education after the election: Priorities for change’, which you can watch back, along with commentaries from speakers covering early years, schools, skills and higher education.

There is a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention in England. This is a long-term problem and there is no sign of it abating, or of any of the measures taken by the last government having had a long-term, meaningful impact in addressing it. In the current year, there is a significant projected under-recruitment of teachers in the primary sector and in the majority of secondary subject areas. Meanwhile, teacher attrition rates have risen back up to pre-pandemic levels. And there is worrying evidence that teaching has become less attractive because it conspicuously lacks the flexible working patterns that are available to graduates in most comparable jobs. (more…)

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4 July 2024

By Charlotte Booth, Claire Crawford, Vanessa Moulton

Every new government likes to put their own stamp on the National Curriculum – with varying use of evidence to support their changes.

The next government is sure to be no different, no matter who wins today. While the UK’s two main parties have campaigned on very different platforms, there is one issue where the Conservatives and Labour do agree – the importance of maths. (more…)