EERA Blog
European Educational
Research Association
When rankings become norms: What school league tables reveal and conceal
League tables promise a simple answer to a hard question: which school is best? Drawing on evidence from Hungary, this post shows what rankings reveal, what they conceal, and why they should never be read as the full measure of school quality.
Physical education in Austria – A capable self in the centre of the curricula
What does a PE curriculum really prioritise? In this post, Professor Sebastian Ruin examines the Austrian PE curriculum, comparing it with Spain’s approach. Despite efforts to embrace broader educational goals, both curricula appear to be driven by the same underlying logic: the production of a capable, healthy, and high-performing self.
Are we pretend thinking – Why scholarly communities still matter in an AI world
AI is changing how researchers think, not just what they produce. Attendees of the EERA Network 01 Summer School explore epistemic literacy, intellectual agency, and why human scholarly communities remain essential.
Black British teens’ experience of school life: race, identity and belonging
Interviews with 37 Black teenagers in northern England reveal family and cultural pride, alongside racism and a Eurocentric curriculum—and highlight the importance of inclusive, anti-racist education.
Equal grades, unequal chances: How implicit expectations shape school transition recommendations
Equal grades don’t always lead to equal opportunities. Research indicates that even when students with and without migration backgrounds achieve the same results, they often receive different school track recommendations.
Reflections of an ERC bursary awardee: How the global forum of ECER promotes self education
In this personal reflection, ERC bursary winner Mutmainna shares how attending ERC and ECER in Belgrade transformed her understanding of whole self education.
Physical Education in the UK: Exploring provisions across the four home nations
This blog, the first in the EERA-funded seminar series on Physical Education Curriculum Learning across European Borders, explores PE curricula across the UK’s four home nations — Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The unfixable university? Equity, politics, and Higher Education reform
Universities in crisis: courses closing, staff redundancies, and equity progress that remains painfully slow. In this post, Richard Budd — keynote speaker at the Emerging Researchers Conference 2026 in Tampere — examines the structural contradictions driving the UK higher education crisis, who holds power in the system, and why reform is so hard to achieve despite the evidence pointing the way.
The well of resilience is running dry, but universities keep drawing from it
Resilience is often praised as a professional virtue, but what happens when it becomes something the job quietly depends on? Research with teacher educators in Ireland and the UK reveals how universities have built working conditions that rely on staff absorbing excessive pressures.
Who gets to collaborate? Diversity and inclusion in a decade of research into higher education at ECER
A new study by EERA Network 22 maps ten years of international cooperation in higher education research at ECER — and finds a landscape shaped as much by language and geography as by shared academic interest.
Introducing a new series: Exploring Physical Education curriculum across European borders
Physical education has long been criticised for being narrow and exclusionary — but what happens when researchers and teachers from across Europe come together to question it? A new EERA-funded seminar series is doing just that, creating a space for cross-border dialogue to critically examine PE curricula and co-create more inclusive approaches to the subject.
Empowering racialised women in European academia: Collaboration across borders
Across Europe, racialised women in postgraduate education face overlapping barriers rooted in colonial histories and gendered exclusion. This transnational project — spanning England, France, Portugal, and Spain — investigates their experiences and builds capacity through solidarity, intersectional research, and cross-border collaboration.
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