Category: SIOE

  • Sharing the knowledge: training doctoral students to write beyond academia

    Sharing the knowledge: training doctoral students to write beyond academia

    In 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the president of the United States horrified the medical establishment by proposing injections with disinfectant as a treatment for COVID. It’s hard to think of a better example as to why now, perhaps more than ever, society needs to hear from experts – and those experts…

  • Mitigating the impacts of the teacher recruitment and retention crisis through sustained subject specific professional development

    Mitigating the impacts of the teacher recruitment and retention crisis through sustained subject specific professional development

    The House of Commons Education Committee report on teacher recruitment,training and retention highlights the ongoing crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, with shortfalls in many subject areas and many teachers working outside their specialism, with detrimental effects on teacher workload, teaching quality and pupil progression. One way to mitigate the challenges of teachers working outside…

  • How can we better support male students with their mental health?

    How can we better support male students with their mental health?

    April is stress awareness month. We all experience stress at some point in our lives, and hopefully have support we can access through friends, family, the workplace or our communities. But there is a perception that men should be invulnerable and therefore not be in need of support, and this can exacerbate stress for our…

  • Let’s go round again: reforming 16-19 qualifications

    Let’s go round again: reforming 16-19 qualifications

    ‘We need our 16-19 education system to be the best in the world. We need to make sure that every young person – no matter their circumstances or where they live – can reach their potential and leave education with the knowledge and skills to thrive in a world-leading economy.’ (DfE 2023, p.5) If the…

  • No end and no beginning; race equity in higher education

    No end and no beginning; race equity in higher education

    Some years ago, through a pedagogy of the oppressed approach and by teaching with love, I embarked on using co-creation to explore racialised experiences raised by our students within our Race Equality Charter (REC) survey. I was compelled to act and so much so that my doctorate study explores using co-created decolonised pedagogy and curriculum…

  • Leading by accident and design

    Leading by accident and design

    “Thanks love, is the vet coming now?” When I started out as a new graduate vet, I rapidly got used to hearing this phrase at the end of consultations. I’m not sure if this was an assumption related to my gender or my age, to be fair it was probably a bit of both, but…

  • Learning through outdoor adventure today helps young people adapt to the challenges of tomorrow

    Learning through outdoor adventure today helps young people adapt to the challenges of tomorrow

    Within a world which currently resembles a moving target, an enormous amount of unmitigated information is at young people’s fingertips. Consequently, the measure of their knowledge is not the amount of this information which can be retained (cognitive skills). Rather, it is their ability to curate (filter and process) material coupled with an understanding of…

  • England’s Pisa is decidedly lop-sided

    England’s Pisa is decidedly lop-sided

    This year’s PISA results were launched in the offices of Policy Exchange. It was a fitting choice – according to Nick Gibb the former schools minister, given that of all the think tanks, Policy Exchange is one of those which has had the greatest influence over the direction of England’s education policy since the election…

  • Writing on writing: five suggestions for challenging your writing practices

    Writing on writing: five suggestions for challenging your writing practices

    In this post I reflect on strategies that help me write. Of course, I still get stuck, distracted or temporarily disheartened, feeling that whatever I write is inadequate. But writing captures, however clumsily, an expression of an idea, an argument, a position, at a moment in time. And it can always be revised. As I…

  • Widening Participation in 2023: shifting policy drivers, shifting institutional responses

    Widening Participation in 2023: shifting policy drivers, shifting institutional responses

    Widening participation is essentially about two things: 1) making it easier for underrepresented groups to access higher education than it would be otherwise – a project closely tied to notions of social justice and attempts to eradicate access inequality; 2) it is about ensuring that there is a sufficiently highly educated labour force for the…