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Archive for the 'young people' Category

Faltering progress: reflections on Action for Climate Empowerment at COP28

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 20 February 2024

IYCDP Graduation pose for a group photo during the UN Climate Change Conference COP28 at Expo City Dubai on December 8, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (Photo by COP28 / Anthony Fleyhan)

International Youth Climate Delegate Program group at COP28, Dubai. Photo by COP28 / Anthony Fleyhan.

Kate Greer and Nicola Walshe.

COP28 news coverage focused attention on an agreement to transition away from fossil fuels, plus funding for ‘loss and damage’, but what happened in the UNFCCC Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) workstream concerned with engaging all citizens in climate change action through education and public participation?  (more…)

Understanding the care workforce crisis: a research-policy relationship

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 2 November 2023

A dad adjusts a toddler's seat on an adult bicycle while a child wears a colourful helmet. Credit: Cavan via Adobe Stock.

Credit: Cavan via Adobe Stock.

Claire Cameron and Eva Lloyd, Visiting Professor, UCL.

A growing research literature has demonstrated that positive experiences early on in life are associated with more positive adult outcomes, so investing early is key for societal wellbeing. Central to this is the children’s workforce, from health visitors to early childhood education and care practitioners and social workers. In a newly published edited volume from past and present TCRU researchers, Social Research for our Times (UCL Press), we examine how social research and policy can interact (or not) to achieve progressive objectives for children and the professionals who provide their care. Whether the research is ‘strategic’ (with a longer-term orientation) or ‘tactical’ (more…)

Working class young people still often rely on luck for social mobility

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 13 June 2023

Young woman crossed fingers for luck. Credit: Kues1 via Adobe

Credit: Kues1 via Adobe

Louise Archer.

This article was originally published on Wonkhe.

What is the secret of social mobility? How and why do some working class young people “go against the grain” to succeed educationally?

Our recent ASPIRES study, based at UCL, found that luck seems to play a key role in creating opportunities for social mobility.

The study draws on insights from over 200 longitudinal interviews conducted with 20 working class young people and 22 of their parents over an 11-year period, from age 10-21. (more…)

How many 15-year-olds are gullible enough to get scammed by a spam email?

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 1 April 2023

A male teenager sits at his desk in the dark. His face is illuminated by his laptop screen and his expression is one of anguish. Image credit: Africa Studio via Adobe Stock.

Image credit: Africa Studio via Adobe Stock.

John Jerrim.

Online fraud is very serious business. We are faced with it every day. Indeed, as I am writing this blog, I’ve just received an email from a prince from a far-off-land who has an “exciting” business opportunity he wishes to discuss with me…….

I’m sure you have all received such emails as well: it is estimated that around 3.4 billion spam emails are sent every day. But how many young people are actually at risk of being duped by such a primitive digital scam?

Given that in many countries today it’s April Fools’ Day, essentially a day where we celebrate gullibility, let’s take a look. (more…)

Young people’s physical health during the COVID-19 pandemic

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 31 January 2023

Jake Anders

Although young people were among those least likely to be directly affected by severe effects of COVID-19, they were not immune from its immediate effects on health. We are better able to understand the implications of this using data from the COVID Social Mobility & Opportunities study (COSMO). The study includes a representative sample of over 13,000 young people across England, who were aged 14–15 at the onset of the pandemic, and 16–17 during the academic year 2020/21 when our first data were collected.

COSMO’s purpose is also wider than the direct health impacts of COVID-19. As such, this blog post — drawing on our latest COSMO briefing published today — also takes a wider look at young people’s health behaviours during this period. (more…)

Climate change education: what happened at COP27 and what happens next?

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 23 November 2022

Photo: UNFCC via Creative Commons

Kate Greer and Nicola Walshe, Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education (CCCSE).

So, how was COP?

Good…? Exhausting…? Productive…? Challenging…?

It is difficult to sum up the experience of attending the annual UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP. COP can be heartwarming and heartbreaking. It can leave you feeling determined and despairing. Motivated and overwhelmed. Fearful and hopeful. All at the same time. Intertwined with the tangle of feelings that we bring home from our experience at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, one thing is (relatively) clear. This year, COP27 resulted in good news for education. Through an immense collaborative effort of Member Parties and Observers, progress was made towards implementing an internationally coordinated educational response to climate change. Here, we briefly reflect on this achievement and its implications for climate change education in England and further afield.

Of foremost importance for education is that at COP27 countries agreed to a new global Action Plan on Action for Climate Empowerment, or ACE. ACE is the term used to describe a broad area of work set out in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) and the Paris Agreement (2015) which includes education alongside five other elements: (more…)

School belonging: the conviction of hope

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 1 November 2022

The School Belonging Colloquium Team: Julia Dobson, Professor Kathryn Riley (back row, left to right) Kristy Campbell, Dr Rahil Alipour ( front row, left to right)

The School Belonging Colloquium Team: Julia Dobson, Professor Kathryn Riley (back row, left to right); Kristy Campbell, Dr Rahil Alipour (front row, left to right)

Kathryn Riley.

It’s time to hone our skills. As educators in a chaotic national climate, we need to bear witness to what is happening today and its impact on our young people. We also need to walk the path of hope and possibilities. This is not easy.

Disconnection, disengagement and disillusionment are in the air. Poverty and insecurity are growing, with significant consequences for the very fabric of society. Yet how we talk and act as educators, will influence how young people see themselves today and view their future place in the world.

At a recent UCL School Belonging Colloquium, Dame Mary Marsh, one-time CEO of the NSPCC saw the contemporary challenge in these terms: the biggest poverty of all is that of hope’. In today’s strange, dark and difficult times schools, wherever they are in the world, need to be places of belonging and hope. (more…)

The disadvantage gap: children of austerity or children of adversity?

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 6 September 2022

chezbeate / Pixabay

Neil Kaye.

Last month, hundreds of thousands of young people nervously opened their GCSE results – the first time in the post-pandemic world that such exams had been sat by a full cohort of Year 11 students. Whilst the headlines focused on the apparent fall in average grades from those of the previous two years, the results also highlight a seemingly-inevitable outcome of our present education system: the persistence of a ‘disadvantage’ attainment gap.

A recent IFS report concluded that, “despite decades of policy attention, there has been virtually no change in the ‘disadvantage gap’ in GCSE attainment over the past 20 years”. Whilst some improvement has been noted, modelling by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) from before the pandemic observed that “at the current rate of progress, it would take over 500 years for this gap to close completely at the end of secondary school” (Lupton & Hayes, 2021).

So, is this gap in attainment inevitable? Is it ‘baked’ into the system? Are the policies of successive governments doomed to failure, or have they (more…)

Belonging part 3: ‘This is how we look, this is how we talk…’

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 13 July 2022

 Illustration by Kristy Campbell

Kathryn Riley.

There is a curiously British aversion to talking about matters that might upset the neighbours. This feeling lurks at the back of many a staffroom, like some unwelcome spectre at the feast, or an aged parrot on the shoulder, grown weary by the passing of the years. Yet, disturb things we must. If schools are to become places of belonging, then some difficult conversations need to take place. This blog – the third in the ‘Belonging’ Series – is about how.

In 1981, I was teaching in a South London secondary school when the Brixton Riots erupted. In their wake, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher brought in senior judge Lord Scarman to examine the causes. His excoriating report pointed to (more…)

Belonging part 1:  the ‘red card’ of exclusion

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 22 June 2022

Kathryn Riley.

‘You must shun (this girl) .. avoid her company, exclude her from your sports, shut her out of your converse… (she) is a liar’.  So pronounced Mr Brocklehurst, proprietor of Lowood School. His venom was directed against Jane Eyre, the eponymous heroine of Charlotte Bronte’s novel.

Some time ago, I interviewed young people who had been excluded from school. They drew pictures of how they felt. One image has long haunted me. At the center is a small child looking distraught. The caption around the drawing reads:

      You’re thick..  You’re stupid..  You don’t belong here..  Get out of my school… (more…)