A student hesitates before answering a question—not because they don’t know the answer, but because they are translating their thoughts from their home language into English. Meanwhile, in another school, a teacher discourages students from speaking anything other than English, believing it will help them integrate. These everyday moments reflect a broader issue: the undervaluing…

Let’s start with a couple of questions: 1) When you supervise your doctoral students, are you teaching them? And 2) Are they learning? We think you probably answered ‘yes’ to question 1, and ‘hopefully’ to question 2. So, why is it that in many universities, doctoral supervision is positioned as a ‘research’ duty and not…

In recognition of International Women’s Day, allow us to introduce you to Brittany. Brittany has changed her life and is now changing the lives of those around her. Brittany is a champion of Sheffield Hallam’s partnership nursery and Save the Children UK’s Sheffield Early Learning Community. She was part of the BBC Panorama documentary programme Britain’s…

How can research with children inform policy in relation to community engagement with climate solutions? And what are the implications of the context we find ourselves working in; a context of increasingly urgent calls for ‘solutions’ to climate collapse, with an emphasis on time as ‘running out’, Voices of the Future, a three-year, multi-site project…

In educational research, we often ‘do theory’ as a preamble to what we theorise about. For example, in theses and dissertations, a literature review is most often undertaken before data-gathering. This structuring is necessary to assist students through the process. In ‘real life’, though, we tend to engage in habitual social practices to which theory…

Technological developments have always caused a stir in education. Some of us are old enough to remember the concerns of many teachers in the late 1970s and early 1980s that ownership and use of the pocket calculator would result in an innumerate population. But as slide rules and log tables went into hibernation, mathematics examinations…

Sometimes we are prone to thinking that the grass is greener elsewhere, but in terms of flexible working practices, the verdancy is more striking in the wider workforce compared to working in schools. Teachers have worked this out; more than six out of ten have said they are highly likely to leave teaching in order…

I’ve often wrestled with how we understand and treat neurodivergent children in schools. We tend to focus on diagnoses, behaviours, and interventions—essentially reducing children to two-dimensional shorthand. This flattening of experience misses something vital: the human, emotional, messy, lived realities of these children. That’s what led me to fiction, and why I believe it can…

As anyone with young children in their lives knows, those young children love to hear the same stories again and again and again. It may be tiresome for adults, but children love listening to the same story. Why is that? And could repeated reading benefit children’s learning and development? Repetition is a fundamental learning process,…