Accessibility is not just physical access, it also concerns digital products, spaces and services. Credit: Sophie Mitchell for UCL.

11 March 2025

By Leda Kamenopoulou and Ben Watson

What is and what is not accessibility?

Accessibility is often defined as the extent to which products, services and spaces are easy for people with disabilities to access and use. In this blog post, we argue that this is a narrow view and accessibility is a lot more than that. We do this by busting six common misconceptions. (more…)

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27 February 2025

By Kaori Kitagawa

This post is the second of three in a series on disaster and climate education. Read part one: Pedagogies for disaster and climate risk reduction.

Compared to didactic, ‘knowledge transmission’ models, more collaborative approaches stand out as an appropriate pedagogy for disaster and climate education (DCE). Preparing for disasters in communities or households will benefit from building solidarity and sharing responsibilities. By enabling a social learning environment, collaborative learning pedagogies cultivate a sense of belonging. This inclusive space values and respects every member, which plays a crucial role in promoting social justice. But we can go further. (more…)

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20 February 2025

By Kaori Kitagawa

As climate change accelerates, regions worldwide are grappling with increased flooding, droughts and wildfires. Areas prone to seismic activity frequently face large-scale earthquakes. Such catastrophic events disrupt lives and have fatal consequences. We need ‘education’ – formal, informal and lifelong learning – to help citizens navigate them. In this series of blog posts, I and my colleague Hans Svennevig discuss pedagogical approaches to education for reducing disaster and climate risk. This post explores the range of pedagogies used, and in the second I look in particular at ‘co-learning’ approaches in this field. In the third post Hans shares practical examples. (more…)

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11 February 2025

By David Scott

This short piece is a plea for full disclosure in processes of peer review and evaluation in academia. It stems from a philosophy of research explained in the trilogy of books that I have just published with UCL Press: On Learning: A General Theory of Objects and Object-Relations (2021); the edited collection On Learning: volume 2, Philosophy, Concepts and Practices (2024); and On Learning: volume 3, Curriculum, Knowledge and Ethics (2025). It is also reflected in my latest publication, On Learning and Ethics: Philosophy, Knowledge and Normativity (2025, Ethics International Press). That philosophy of research is underpinned by a semantic and valorised epistemology – meanings and values are prioritised – and by a careful and ethical approach to the world. (more…)

Credit: Sam Balye via Unsplash.

28 January 2025

By Sandra Leaton-Gray and David Scott, with Rita Chawla-Duggan, University of Bath

In many higher education institutions, best practice principles for curriculum design frequently reflect a model that perpetuates colonial assumptions about knowledge, learning, and assessment. These principles, ranging from “cutting-edge content” to “optimised engagement”, prioritise well-recognised measurable benchmarks and notions of corporate efficiency while failing to interrogate the power structures embedded in curricula. A decolonised curriculum, on the other hand, challenges these assumptions and offers a transformative approach to education. In this blog post we analyse what that means and how it might best be achieved, drawing on learning from other, interconnected parts of the education system. (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…)

The stone columns UCL Wilkins building lit in purple to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Credit: Mary Hinkley, UCL Creative Media Services.

5 December 2024

By Andrew Lawrence

On Monday 9 December, UCL’s Centre for Holocaust Education marks UN Genocide Prevention Day with a special conversation between a survivor, teachers and students. The roundtable discussion will explore the possibilities that genocide education affords as well as the challenges that tackling such sensitive histories brings. (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…)

UCL speaker presenting with a microphone. Credit: Mary Hinkley for UCL.

29 October 2024

By Leda Kamenopoulou

Synchronous accessibility can be challenging

In a previous IOE blog, I wrote about accessibility as a right and not an option, and I summarised key actions for creating accessible digital content, such as Word and PowerPoint documents. These resources, however, are almost always created asynchronously. In this post, I consider how to make sure live teaching delivery is accessible, focusing in this instance on the needs of students with hearing impairment. I list best practices that I recommend as an expert on inclusive education and sensory accessibility, and as a programme leader for UCL’s Special and Inclusive Education MA, experienced in putting reasonable adjustments in place for our students. (more…)