Â鶹ÒùÔº

A gap in disability research: ‘Preparedness’ of teachers with disabilities amid Covid-19-inspired online learning

Source: Louisa Enyonam Ansah The Covid-19 lockdowns led to a disruption in education for nearly 1.6 billion of the world’s student population (Lennox et al., 2021). As a result, online...

Postgraduate research students’ experiences of the coronavirus pandemic

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has caused most postgraduate research (PGR) students to encounter research restrictions and undertake their research duties from home (see Burridge et al., 2020)....

Distance learning & initial teacher education: Making connections in a virtual world

The peaks and troughs of the Covid-19 pandemic continue to impact on almost every aspect of our daily lives, and initial teacher education (ITE) is by no means an exception. Reflecting on changes...

Adapting one-to-one reading support for children during Covid-19 school closures

Education & Covid-19: Â鶹ÒùÔº Small Grants Fund research reports

Innovations and challenges among reading recovery teachers in Bristol

The fear factor: Children’s post-lockdown maths anxiety

Maths anxiety (MA) plays a role in educational disparities and the gender pay gap, yet it is not often addressed at the chalkface. Covid-induced school disruption may have made learning for...

What sources of data did teachers use to inform remote teaching under Covid-19?

Education & Covid-19: Â鶹ÒùÔº Small Grants Fund research reports

Exploring how teachers collected and used data to make decisions about their practice while working in uncertain, rapidly changing conditions during lockdown and school closures, this report...

The impact of home-schooling on family wellbeing: Working mothers’ perspectives

School closures implemented during the pandemic to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 meant that parents had to take on home-schooling and extra childcare responsibilities. These responsibilities...

Learning from lockdown: Experiences of autistic children and young people and their families

Research on the Covid-19 pandemic draws attention to its unequal impacts on differently positioned families, particularly highlighting the acute struggles of disadvantaged families (see for...

Teaching English when schools are closed: Experiences & lessons learned

Education & Covid-19: Â鶹ÒùÔº Small Grants Fund research reports

Following their closure to most students in March 2020, schools in England addressed the pedagogical challenge of remote learning using approaches that varied according not only to school culture...

The impact of Covid-19 on children in early years settings

In April 2020, senior managers from Kids Planet Day Nurseries[1] approached researchers at York St John University to explore the impact of Covid-19 on the young children in their care. Two...

How has Covid-19 affected how teacher educators engage their students in learning?

Education & Covid-19: Â鶹ÒùÔº Small Grants Fund research reports

This report presents a mixed-methods investigation of how Covid-19 affected the ways in which teacher educators in Wales engaged their students with learning, and how the switch to online delivery...

SENCOs, crisis planning in schools and the international problem of ‘off rolling’ or ‘grey exclusions’

In a newly published study (Done & Knowler, 2021a) we investigated the strategic leadership role of special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) in planning for Covid-19 with particular...

Exclusion & the strategic leadership role of special educational needs co-ordinators in England

Education & Covid-19: Â鶹ÒùÔº Small Grants Fund research reports

This report asks whether and how special educational needs co-ordinators (SENCOs) participated in Covid-19-induced school planning for lockdown, provision for vulnerable pupils and full school...

Exploring the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the health & wellbeing of learners with autism

Education & Covid-19: Â鶹ÒùÔº Small Grants Fund research reports

Documenting an explorative qualitative study involving 20 learners with autism aged 14–19 based in the West Midlands region of England, this report considers the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic...

How newly qualified teachers are coping in the time of Covid-19

Newly qualified teachers (NQTs) have arguably always had tough challenges to overcome; two in every five NQTs experience mental health problems (Education Support Network, 2018). Challenges cited...

Emergency remote learning in the UK: A comparison of March 2020 and January 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic has severely impacted everyday life around the world. In the UK, lockdowns have resulted in the closure of schools to most children for two prolonged periods: March to summer...

Covid-19: Transitioning back to school

Government decisions made during Covid-19 resulted in the closure of many schools, forcing  teachers to move online to ensure that students continued their studies. Described as ‘emergency...

New teachers’ responses to Covid-19: Building on initial teacher education for professional learning

Education & Covid-19: Â鶹ÒùÔº Small Grants Fund research reports

A great deal of international research has suggested that teachers struggled with the pivot towards online learning necessitated by the closure of schools in response to the Covid-19...

How do we teach English when schools are ‘closed’?

In this Â鶹ÒùÔº-funded project we investigated how teachers adapted to the ‘new normal’ of online delivery from March 2020 until the reopening of schools on 8 March 2021. Surveys undertaken in...

Education & Covid-19: Â鶹ÒùÔº Small Grants Fund research reports

This series of reports presents the findings and recommendations of 14 research projects  that have investigated Covid-19's impact on important aspects of education and educational research. This...

Is ‘lost learning’ the new crisis in education?

Concerns around lost learning have been a pervasive and recurrent theme of late – all of which can be traced back to the closing of schools over the past year in response to the Covid-19...

Researching in Covid-era schools

Paul Willis, in Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977), joins his teenage research subjects in their extracurricular trips to the pub, in the name of holistic ethnography. I used to use this anecdote...

The problems with resilience thinking

The Covid-19 pandemic has given new currency to the idea of resilience, in terms of adapting to and recovering from adversity. However, in recent years the discourse of resilience has become...

What have we learned about effectively using assessment data during remote learning over the past year?

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many teachers around the globe found themselves forced to teach in remote or online environments. This blog post explores initial findings about the assessment data...

New teachers’ responses to Covid-19: Getting by or getting ahead?

New teachers might have been expected to experience particular difficulties in moving to remote emergency teaching in March 2020. Funded by a Â鶹ÒùÔº Covid-19 small grant project, we are exploring in...

We need an evidence-based expert approach to the post-pandemic recovery of young people

In December 2020, the Westminster government promised to set up an expert group to consider solutions to the huge variability of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on pupils’ educational...

The impact of school closures on pupils with English as an additional language

Pupils with English as an additional language (EAL) attract a great deal of interest among policymakers, school leaders and teachers, yet there are relatively few studies that have examined EAL...

Reimagining creative research methods & collaborative relationships in the context of Covid-19

Reflections on presenting at the Â鶹ÒùÔº ECR Network symposium, January 2021

Is it okay to HIIT in primary physical education?

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is a form of exercise that involves repeated bouts of near-maximal effort often followed by short (60 seconds) recovery times (ACSM, 2014). HIIT is popular...

Empowering marginalised parents to undertake home-schooling during Covid-19

The strains on the education system caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have forced many parents to have to contend with significant changes in their daily routines. A study of seven countries in...

The Covid-19 pandemic and the early years workforce

The evidence is clear that motivated, knowledgeable and experienced staff are key to supporting children’s development in early years settings (see for example Melhuish, Ereky-Stevens, &...

Children have a right to be involved in decisions about their future education, health and wellbeing

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, children across the world have experienced significant changes to their lives. Save the Children (2020, p. 4) report that an estimated 99 per cent of...

Bubble, toil and trouble: School leadership as Shakespearean tragedy in and after Covid-19

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the witches exacerbate divisions, push ambition through brute force, hierarchy and power; their interventions end in the wicked destruction of leadership potential and...

‘The significant return to normality’: Back to school in England, but who is missing?

As part of the gradual lifting of lockdown measures in England, following the ‘second wave’ of the Covid-19 pandemic here, schools reopen wholesale today, 8 March 2021. For many parents and...

The £350 billion home-schooling question

Education research hit the headlines recently. The BBC reported research claiming that time spent out of school due to coronavirus could cost each child £40,000 in lifetime earnings. By the time...

What ‘building back better’ really means for our children: Anne Longfield’s final speech as the children’s commissioner for England

On February 17 2021, Anne Longfield OBE gave her final speech as the children’s commissioner for England. Her words were a clarion cry for the UK’s children, who for the past 12 months have...

Â鶹ÒùÔº Bites, issue 7: Exploring the impact of Covid-19: Pedagogy, curriculum & assessment

Â鶹ÒùÔº Bites

The coronavirus pandemic and its associated lockdowns upended our lives and presented challenges and consequences that were previously unimaginable. Teachers were flung in at the deep end with...

Conducting research during the pandemic using an ‘ethics of care’

The Covid-19 pandemic has created economic and social instability for many people in Britain and around the world. As such, we might consider it an experience of ‘collective trauma’, combining...

How has Covid-19 affected the way in which teacher educators engage their students with learning?

Highlights from the first 1,000 Â鶹ÒùÔº Blog posts

In this blog we seek to understand the impact that the sudden and enforced move to online teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic has had on the perceptions of teacher educators in initial teacher...

Access denied: Education in rural India during Covid-19

The disruptive effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are borne disproportionately by already disadvantaged social groups. When all educational institutions across India shifted to online and distance...

Silver linings: Lockdown legacies

In my November 2020 Â鶹ÒùÔº Blog, ‘Reading during lockdown: Supporting vulnerable learners’, I reported on the beginnings of a small-scale research project (funded by Â鶹ÒùÔº) to explore the impact...

Education during a pandemic: Lessons from the United Arab Emirates

Even before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic I was wondering, as a teacher and researcher, whether technology and digital platforms would replace teachers and traditional classrooms in the short...

Reading during lockdown: Supporting vulnerable learners

Learning to read is perhaps the most important thing we learn to do. There is significant evidence that being a reader impacts on future social, emotional, economic and academic success. A failure...

Could Dido Harding move into education next?

Dido Harding was appointed as a Conservative peer (Baroness Harding of Winscombe) by then prime minister David Cameron in 2014. She is head of the NHS test and trace programme, and has been...

The fragilities in the English education system revealed by Covid-19, and how to put them right

Covid-19 has presented schools with a series of dilemmas since lockdown began, and continues to do so as schools seek to reopen to all their pupils. There have been few reliable sources of advice...

Maths at the kitchen table: Capturing teacher and family voices on online teaching and learning in Covid-19 times

The Covid-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on everyday life across the world. In January 2020, we could not have imagined that in just a few months as many as 138 countries would...

English instrumental music teaching: A model for authentic learning

At the time of writing, as we move through the Covid-19 pandemic, most children in the UK have been away from school for nearly half a year, no end-of-year public examinations have taken place,...

Â鶹ÒùÔº awards over £50,000 of funding for COVID-19 research

In response to the challenges imposed by the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown Â鶹ÒùÔº created the Small Grants Fund. This is a fund aimed at supporting Educational Research into timely issues, and we...

Pupils with English as an Additional Language, their families and COVID-19: current challenges and finding a way forward

This episode of the Â鶹ÒùÔº Podcast explores how how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted primary and post-primary pupils with English as an Additional Language (EAL) and their families.

The Impact of Covid-19

In 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic transformed the way we live, work, research, teach and learn. This series explores the impact of the pandemic on our members. Click below to listen to the podcasts...

Educational Technology and Covid-19

This episode of the Â鶹ÒùÔº Podcast explores the impact of Covid-19 on Educational Technology

The thin line between gaming and learning

When we went into ‘lockdown’ because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and were denied access to face-to-face education, educators had to swiftly improvise. By transferring existing educational...

‘PE’ with Joe (Bloggs): The rise and risks of celebrity ‘teachers’

Long before Covid-19 altered the way learning and teaching takes place, the subject of physical education (PE) was somewhat marginalised in the school curriculum. Within the UK, as elsewhere,...

Online education: What will we keep as lockdown ends?

Teachers across the world have never had to work so hard or so creatively. As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, professional development that would otherwise have taken years has been crammed...

Adapting to the new normal in survey research

Covid-19 has greatly impacted ongoing projects by causing disruption to the research process and delays in data collection, and in some cases research funding has been reduced or withdrawn to...

Who Owns the Curriculum Now?

This episode of the Â鶹ÒùÔº Podcast explores the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Curriculum, including the structures involved; and the responses being made.

Thinking about care and care needs in the context of Covid-19

This episode of the Â鶹ÒùÔº Podcast features an interview with an Assistant Headteacher of an inner city primary school in Yorkshire, who discusses the challenges her school has faced providing for...

The Importance of Nature: before, during and after Covid-19

In this mini episode Dr Tracy Hayes (University of Cumbria) and Dr Mark Leather (Plymouth Marjon University) discuss the importance of nature, outdoor learning and play before, during and after...

‘Can everybody hear me?’: Foundation year students’ experiences of studying during lockdown

Foundation year programmes aim to prepare ‘widening participation’ students for university-level study, and focus on developing study skills and underpinning knowledge on their chosen subject...

The Impact of Covid-19 on Mental Health, Wellbeing and Education

In our first episode, two convenors from the Â鶹ÒùÔº Mental Health, Wellbeing and Education Special Interest Group speak about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on their special interest...

Renegotiating teacher identities: Reflections on student wellbeing and online learning during Covid-19

In response to the current Covid-19 outbreak, universities across Australia quickly moved to restructure the delivery of their courses that customarily took place on campus. We are both first year...

Covid-19 and schooling for uncertainty

Covid-19 reveals an urgent need to focus on an area of worldwide educational significance: the importance for schools of engaging with uncertainty as a key facet of education. In recent decades, a...

Virtual teaching for children with dyslexia: The realities and disturbing absence of research

Covid-19, education and educational research

I am writing this post from both a parental and scientific perspective. Firstly, from a parental stance, SARS-CoV-2 and subsequent coronavirus 19 has undoubtedly driven us into situations that...

Agility, return and recovery: Our new Covid context for schooling and teacher education?

Covid-19, education and educational research

Previously on the Â鶹ÒùÔº blog (Kidd, 2020a) I have drawn attention to the work of Glade Primary School, an east-London school in the borough of Redbridge, England, and their ‘agile’ adoption of...

The coronavirus crisis: What support for early career researchers?

From issue 143 of Research Intelligence, Â鶹ÒùÔº's members' magazine.

Identifying the potential impacts of Covid-19 on school-based sexuality education

Covid-19, education and educational research

The ideas presented in this blog were developed in dialogue with a number of English sexuality education organizations, including acetUK, It Happens, Susie March, Think for Yourself, Teaching...

Researching the world in uncertain times: The role of bricolage

Covid-19, education and educational research

‘Man finds himself living in an aleatory world; his existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable.’ (Dewey, 1929,...

New fund to support research on COVID-19 and education

As part of our response to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, Â鶹ÒùÔº is establishing a small grants fund for research into the impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). This fund aims to support a...

Lessons for adapting home learning from parents with children with special educational needs

Covid-19, education and educational research

‘Doing less, making learning fun and looking after everyone’s wellbeing’

The rise of the flexible and remote teacher: A primary school’s response to the Covid-19 context in London

Covid-19, education and educational research

On Friday 29 May 2020, ITV ran a story on the London regional news about a primary school whose pupils were reported to be ‘traveling the world’ through the adoption of video conferencing (VC)...

Social constructivism and participative learning beyond bricks and mortar

Covid-19, education and educational research

As the world grapples with the short-to-longer-term imperative to identify distance- and remote-learning alternatives to previously face-to-face instruction, I am struck that some of the key...

School transition, socioeconomic inequalities in wellbeing and the Covid-19 pandemic

Covid-19, education and educational research

Children’s education and wellbeing are profoundly influenced by the circumstances into which they are born. Being from a wealthier family is associated with a range of positive outcomes. Poverty...

International students and Covid-19: What is the current advice?

The pandemic that has gripped the UK has meant that uncertainty becoming central to our way of life. With borders closed, migration curtailed and social distancing policies in place, this...

Time for educational researchers to take their place in the sun?

Covid-19, education and educational research

As recent posts on the Â鶹ÒùÔº Blog have demonstrated, in the quiet chaos of lockdown a range of taken-for-granted assumptions (Courtney et al., 2020), competencies (Zhou & Wolstencroft, 2020) and...

Announcement for Â鶹ÒùÔº Annual Conference 2020

Dear colleagues, All of us will have spent the past few weeks responding to the implications for our professional and personal lives of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the profound impact it...

COVID-19: Online teaching and learning

A new virtual issue of BJET Online learning and teaching has necessarily come to the fore over the past few weeks and months as we adapt to Covid-19. In a new virtual issue of the British Journal...

Online teacher education in times of Covid-19

Covid-19, education and educational research

Almost all dimensions of human experience have been affected by the Covid-19 outbreak, and governments around the world have adopted stringent measures to stop the spread of the virus. One such...

Making post-GCSE decisions during the Covid-19 crisis: The need for action

Covid-19, education and educational research

In the public debate about the impacts of the Covid-19 lockdown on education, much attention has understandably been given to concerns about disadvantaged children falling behind at school, and to...

Opportunities missed: Then the rains came down and washed the writing away

Covid-19, education and educational research

Discussion among researchers at the moment is mostly punctuated with references to Covid-19. From across the various fields that my research cross-sections – primary English, children’s...

Should we really call this home schooling? Reflections from the research field

Covid-19, education and educational research

Within this current context, the term ‘home schooling’ is often deployed in a blanket way to describe what is likely to be a plethora of activities and methods of teaching and learning largely...

Quarantined at home? Craft productive learningscapes and workspaces through the use of recorded music

The Covid-19 pandemic means that countless students and educational staff are expected to continue their work from home. The worldwide quarantine has been a game-changer, blurring the boundaries...

What you need to know to get the best from online education: A BJET/JCAL virtual special issue

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re all going through a period unlike any we have ever experienced. With respect to teaching and learning, students can’t attend school and universities – and...

Going beyond the evidence: Research and the media

Covid-19, education and educational research

In a previous blog (published yesterday) I reflected on the danger of researchers going beyond the evidence in presenting policy-relevant findings: putting forward empirical conclusions as cogent...

Education, children’s futures and Covid-19

Covid-19, education and educational research

Last year I conducted a research project with 12 early-career primary teachers. While exploring their sense of purpose, I found that many teachers were driven by a commitment to preparing their...

Practical science and pandemics

Covid-19, education and educational research

As the whole planet finds itself engulfed in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has become increasingly clear that the public needs to be well equipped with the skills to deal with scientific...

Â鶹ÒùÔº Blog: Call for contributions on our response to the coronavirus crisis

COVID-19 has, over the last few weeks and months, transformed the way we live, work, research, teach and learn. The Â鶹ÒùÔº community has not only an opportunity but a responsibility to provide...

Collaborative distance-learning in a time of coronavirus

Covid-19, education and educational research

James Derounian of the Association of National Teaching Fellows offers tips on delivering quality distance-learning for quarantined students.

Five education myths that Covid-19 shatters

Highlights from the first 1,000 Â鶹ÒùÔº Blog posts

Education has been practised and conceptualised internationally in ways that demonstrate its increasing privatisation, enabled through a dependency on numerical data and an adherence to a social...

Digital masters? Reflecting on the readiness of students and staff for digital learning

Covid-19, education and educational research

If we assume that necessity really is the mother of invention, then the problems of delivery that arose when the Covid-19 virus crisis hit UK higher education represented a golden opportunity for...

A message from Â鶹ÒùÔº President, Dominic Wyse 03/04/2020

Dear colleagues, We are all living through a life-changing situation, something that continues to raise many profound issues. Education is one of the many vital parts of society that has been...

COVID-19 and Â鶹ÒùÔº

Â鶹ÒùÔº is closely monitoring the developments around the coronavirus (COVID-19) situation. Our position as a charity is to do our best to continue the delivery of our activities in as safe and...