Education in a Post-COVID World: Creating more Resilient Education Systems

Education in a Post-COVID World: Creating more Resilient Education Systems

by | BERA, NW 14 Communities, Families, and Schooling in Educational Research

Schools across Europe have been at the forefront of dealing with the COVID crisis since it began in 2020, coping with different systems of attendance, new methods of learning, and changing government guidance on how to operate. Many education systems have found themselves under pressure in these circumstances. Not all have fared well.  Data from our research[1] tracking how primary teachers in England responded to the disruption provides some insights into whether and how COVID-19 can lead to more resilient education systems. Revaluing local knowledge is a vital element in rebuilding, reconnecting, and reimagining education after the pandemic.

Our data shows that local knowledge provides a more accurate guide to exactly what the problems are and, on that basis, can help determine what the most useful next steps might be.

One key decision that governments faced at the start of the pandemic was whether to close schools or keep them open, at a time when governments found it was hard to judge the risks for children’s health and well-being. Many governments resolved this choice by looking at what others were doing first. 

Here in England, the government opted for closure during the first wave, with schools staying open only for children of key workers or those judged vulnerable. In June, just a few age groups were allowed to return. Since the start of this academic year, all schools were instructed to stay fully open, even in regions with the highest number of infections. Staff or pupils who fell ill and their close contacts were expected to self-isolate.

To cover gaps in provision, the government passed emergency legislation which gave schools “a legal duty to provide remote education for state-funded, school-age children unable to attend school due to coronavirus”. This decision has proved controversial in a system which is not equipped with sufficient digital devices and connectivity to ensure all pupils can benefit in this way. 

These decisions show how far politicians emphasised returning the education system to normal functioning as quickly as possible, fuelled by reports quantifying learning lost during the lockdown. Modelling the consequences of lessons lost, or volume of work returned has certainly created alarming scenarios of widening attainment gaps with severe consequences for the students involved. If teaching and learning are imagined as steady delivery of curriculum content to time and test dates, then “catching up” seems crucial. But is this the right reaction, or a product of insufficient local knowledge to make the right calls?

Research into teacher responses and priorities

By focusing our research on what was happening in real schools in real-time, we and colleagues at UCL Institute of Education have built a clearer picture of how primary teachers responded during the pandemic, their priorities as schools began to fully reopen, and the lessons learnt for the longer term. 

Our survey and interview data demonstrated that teachers were most concerned about pupil wellbeing.  On schools reopening, 76% of teachers thought pupil wellbeing was central with only 8% prioritising “Enabling students to catch up for missed learning”. Teachers thought parents’ priorities would broadly be in line with their own, with the benefits for children of socialising with their friends (54%) and the normality of settling back into school routines (65%) holding more importance than reassurance that children would catch up quickly in core areas of the curriculum (28%). Schools are about much more than curriculum delivery.

Strengthening school communities

Our research showed that teaching during lockdown was changing teachers’ perceptions of their school communities. Many teachers felt more aware of the impact of poverty on pupils’ lives, and recognised the difficulties some families experienced in supporting pupils’ learning at home. Feedback on home-learning highlighted the importance of creating tasks that children would enjoy.  Teachers worked hard to ensure that children without internet access had opportunities to learn offline. 

Many teachers working with our most disadvantaged communities played a key role in supporting families and communities by checking that families were not going hungry, that they had access to other avenues of support, where needed, and that the most vulnerable children were as safe as they could be. This kind of direct support for communities matters, yet it is often overlooked in the public debate on the value of education which frames it as a private rather than a public good.  

Looking ahead – the impact of testing and importance of community resilience

If the COVID crisis has revealed the depth of educational inequalities in societies where economic gaps have widened disproportionately, it can also lead to a re-evaluation of the good that schools can do. Looking ahead,

  • 77% of our respondents agreed with the statement, ‘If testing and inspection goes ahead as normal next year, schools serving the most disadvantaged communities will be unfairly penalised’.
  • 72% agreed ‘Schools have an important role in building community resilience that should be both recognised and funded’ and 73% considered ‘Primary education needs to begin again, with a broader definition of curriculum values and purposes’.
  • Only 4% thought ‘The best approach to supporting children through the crisis is ensuring they reach the expected standards in KS1 and KS2 assessments next year’.

Our research tells us that a narrow focus on repairing test scores is counter-productive. Slower processes of recuperation create firmer foundations for future learning, particularly when they build upon the knowledge teachers have gained from working with their communities during a period of disruption. 

Revaluing local knowledge is a vital element in rebuilding, reconnecting, and reimagining education after the pandemic.  Research can help in making more visible the voices of teachers and their communities and thus creating more resilient education systems.

References and Further Reading

[1] The research project, “A duty of care and a duty to teach: educational priorities in response to the COVID-19 crisis’. Funder: UKRI/ESRC Rapid Response to COVID call, project no. ES/V00414X/1. Researchers: PI: Gemma Moss. Co-Is: Alice Bradbury, Sam Duncan, Sinead Harmey, and Rachael Levy.  See 

Professor Gemma Moss

Professor Gemma Moss

Professor of Literacy, UCL Institute of Education

Gemma Moss is Professor of Literacy at UCL Institute of Education and Director of the International Literacy Centre.  She has written extensively about the evolution of literacy policy, gender and literacy, assessment, and the emergence of new knowledge networks in education.  She was a member of EERA council between 2016-18.

Dr Alice Bradbury

Dr Alice Bradbury

Associate Professor of Sociology of Education, UCL

Alice Bradbury is Associate Professor of Sociology of Education at UCL Institute of Education and Co-Director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy (0-11 years). Her research focuses on the relationship between policy and classroom practices and subjectivities in primary and early years education.

Turning a leaf: a new procedure for European Education Research Journal Special Issues

Turning a leaf: a new procedure for European Education Research Journal Special Issues

by | BERA, EERJ, NW 23 Policy Studies and Politics of Education, NW 28 Sociologies of Education

2020 has been a year like no other. On 31st of December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of ‘pneumonia of unknown etiology’. Less than a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic has shattered social life as we know it. The disease has taken tens of thousands of lives, whilst confining billions to their homes in worldwide ‘lockdowns’, in an effort to mitigate the spread of the lethal disease. In a matter of days, the global health emergency led to an education crisis, too. As country after country ordered school closures, education was suddenly faced with an extraordinary new reality: billions of children around the world became homebound, unable to go to school.

Yet, education did not stop. From nurseries to schools to higher education, we saw concerted and speedy adaptation efforts to create home-schooling and online education environments where students and teachers can interact. The extent to which these solutions are effective, or even available to all learners, will be studied in depth in months and years to come. What is certain is that, similar to all other social policy areas, the effects of the pandemic in education are disproportionately worse for those from more unstable and weaker economic and social backgrounds.

This challenging context was the one in which the European Educational Research Journal changed editors’ hands; after the hard work of its founding Editor-in-Chief Professor Martin Lawn, and a successful five years’ spell under the editorial leadership of Professors Maarten Simons and Eric Mangez that followed, EERJ has now become an established and scientifically recognised journal in the field of education research in Europe and beyond.

 

EERJ is interested in the changing education research horizons in Europe. It sees the field as one that crosses borders through its subjects of study, our scholarly collaborations and the increasing complexity of a fluid and interconnected world. We see our work as the new EERJ co-editors as one of further enhancing the European research identity of the journal. We believe that this will be achieved by following the footpath of our predecessors in promoting the peer review and publishing of robust empirical education research, as well as balancing the journal’s publication profile by moving to a greater parity of the journal’s share of special issues with issues that feature independent article submissions.

 

As many of you know, EERJ has been closely associated to the annual European Conference of Education Research (ECER); we take part in the early career researchers’ conference, giving publishing advice to younger scholars; we organise the conference’s MOOT, a discussion forum around a topic of current interest; and we publish the keynote lectures. The journal, for a long time now, through this productive relationship with ECER, encouraged strong conference panels to submit articles as special issue proposals. Although EERJ will continue to do this important work, it also has to be acknowledged that the journal would now benefit from turning over a new leaf and allowing equal space for the publication of independent research papers, too.

 

Further, it has also become apparent that this is not just an aspiration that relates to scholarship only but perhaps also to practicality: at the moment there is a list of special issues in the pipeline; although all of them are high-quality contributions to the field of education research, the current reality of the global pandemic further increases the need for the journal to be able to be responsive to its contemporary, highly demanding and fluid historical and political environment by publishing independent articles timely and proactively.

 

Therefore, following a recent editorial board meeting and the agreement of all its members, EERJ will follow a new process for special issue submissions. This will be as follows:

 

EERJ will introduce a new ‘Expression of interest’ form with a deadline of the end of September annually. This form will be used as a tool for the evaluation of the significance of the proposal in relation to its empirical and conceptual analysis, and its contribution to the aims and the scope of the journal.  At the end of this competitive process, only a certain number of special issue proposals will go forward. The successful candidates will be invited to submit full proposals by the end of December. Full proposals will be evaluated closely: we will retain the option of rejecting a proposal if they do not fulfil the specified criteria, although we will be giving feedback and helping authors submit strong contributions. Following this process, we hope that annually, by late January, we will have an outcome that will trigger the preparation of three special issues per year.

 

The context in which EERJ is working today is one in which the mobilizing discourses of the European Education Area, combined with other ‘borderless’ flows of internationalisation of programmes, public-private partnerships and university alliances, are re-shaping the milieu of research in education. Above all, the current global pandemic, with its catastrophic effects on European economies and societies, has had -and will continue to have- a direct impact on education research in Europe. Regardless of the detrimental effects of this crisis, education research in Europe is currently thriving: a recent EERJ call for papers for a special issue on ‘Education in the Pandemic’ drew almost 200 high-quality abstracts of empirical research. A continuous challenge for EERJ is to be able to reflect on our current education condition and respond to it by publishing reflexive, robust and innovative research. We hope that this shift in the journal’s profile will help EERJ continue to flourish and grow in an increasingly competitive academic publishing environment and a highly uncertain and unequal world.

 

Professor Sotiria Grek

Professor Sotiria Grek

Professor of European and Global Education Governance / University of Edinburgh

Sotiria Grek is Professor of European and Global Education Governance at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Sotiria’s work focuses on the field of quantification in global public policy, with a specialisation in the policy arenas of education and sustainable development. She has co-authored (with Martin Lawn) Europeanising Education: Governing A New Policy Space (Symposium, 2012) and co-edited (with Joakim Lindgren) Governing by Inspection (Routledge, 2015), as well as the World Yearbook in Education: Accountability and Datafication in Education (with Christian Maroy and Antoni Verger; Routledge, 2021). 

Paolo Landri

Paolo Landri

Senior Researcher of the Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies at National Research Council in Italy

Paolo Landri is a Senior Researcher of the Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies at National Research Council in Italy (CNR-IRPPS).  His main research interests concern educational organizations, digital governance and educational policies. His latest publication is: (2020) Educational Leadership, Management, and Administration through Actor Network Theory, London, Routledge.

Education: An academic discipline or a field?

Education: An academic discipline or a field?

by | BERA

What is the problem?

Education research has periodically been sharply criticised for being weak in comparison with research from other disciplines. Some of this criticism has implied, or suggested more directly, that one of the reasons for the perceived weakness in education research is that education is not a ‘proper’ academic discipline when compared to other disciplines. Some go as far as to define education as a ‘field’ or an ‘applied subject’ (see Furlong, 2013 for an examination of education as a field versus a discipline; see Wyse, Selwyn, Smith and Suter, 2017, for an overview of the range of criticisms from researchers, practitioners and policymakers, that education research has been subject to).

 

Why does this matter?

Correctly categorising education matters because an area of knowledge described as a field is often seen as substandard compared to an area described as a discipline. For example, more than 20 years ago Deem (1996, p.7) noted the effects of discrimination in her university sociology department that she attributed in part to the distinctions that were made between ‘theoretical sociology (regarded as high status … and a masculine preserve’), ‘empirical sociology’, and ‘applied sociology which was generally regarded as being of somewhat lower status, although essential for would-be social workers, and female-dominated’. The debates in sociology about knowledge organisation can be seen mirrored in some debates in university education departments in the 21st century: for instance inequitable salaries; the place of teacher education/training in relation to academics being ‘research active’; lecturer identity and promotion at work; and theories of education as an area of knowledge (for a European perspective on categorising education see Whitty & Furlong, 2017).

 

The depiction and definition of education as a discipline versus a field also matters because people value accuracy and correctness in relation to any area of knowledge. Six criteria for judging whether an area of knowledge might be called a discipline were presented in a working paper from the UK’s ESRC National Centre for Research Methods (Krishnan, 2009). The most important of these was that ‘disciplines must have some institutional manifestation in the form of subjects taught at universities or colleges, respective academic departments and professional associations connected to it.’ Education not only clearly meets this criterion but also, in my view, the other five of Krishan’s criteria: education has, 1. A particular object, or focus, for its research; 2. A body of accumulated specialist knowledge specific to the discipline; 3. Theories that organise the specialist knowledge; 4. Specific terminologies; 5. Specific research methods. I am not suggesting that there is universal agreement on the manifestation of these criteria in education, but that sufficient evidence exists to depict education as an academic discipline.

 

What should be done?

We are approaching the final dates for all university submissions, for all academic disciplines, to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF). The most important outcome of the REF judgement of research quality in the UK will be the dividing of a substantial stream of UK government research funding, by university and by discipline, for what is likely to be at least five years. In other words, there will be institutional and discipline ‘winners and losers’. This allocation will have implications for all disciplines, for example, their capacity to maintain research capacity including people’s research careers. But another important outcome is the REF’s data, analyses and reporting on research outputs and research environment that can be seen as a measure of the state of academic disciplines, beginning in the REF panel reports with how each discipline is defined and described.

On the basis of the kind of work cited in this blog (and previous work cited in Wyse, 2020, and cited in Wyse, Brown, Oliver, & Pobleté, 2020) it is in my view essential that any REF description of education,[1] and any institutional submission for a department of education, clearly portrays education as an academic discipline rather than a field. While there are strategic benefits that arise from the description of some education work as social science, defining education as a field is likely to have a negative impact which risks damage to the future progress of education as an academic discipline in universities, and possibly as a force for good in wider society. Surely a risk not worth taking.
 
 

This blog draws on the articles ‘Education research and educational practice: The qualities of a close relationship’ by Dominic Wyse, Chris Brown, Sandy Oliver and Ximena Pobleté, and ‘Presidential address: The academic discipline of education: Reciprocal relationships between practical knowledge and academic knowledge’ by Dominic Wyse.

Both are published in the British Educational Research Journal, and have been made free-to-view, for a limited period, for those without a subscription, courtesy of the publisher, Wiley.

A video of the latter presidential address, at the BERA Annual Conference 2019, is available here. 

Professor Dominic Wyse

Professor Dominic Wyse

Professor of Early Childhood and Primary Education at the University College London (UCL) Institute of Education (IOE)

Dominic is current President of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) from 2019 to 2021. He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS), and of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).

Prior to his role at the IOE as Head of Academic Department Learning and Leadership Dominic was Faculty Director of Research, Consultancy and Knowledge Transfer, in the Faculty of Children and Learning. Dominic has significant experience in music that began with his undergraduate studies at The Royal Academy of Music.

Before joining the IOE Dominic was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He was also appointed as the first Director of Music-Making at Churchill College Cambridge, where he was a Fellow and Director of Studies for Education. In the past Dominic was a Reader at Liverpool John Moores University, and a teacher with experience working in London, Bradford and Huddersfield in infant and junior phases.

References

Deem, R. (2006). Border territories: A journey through sociology, education and women’s studies. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 17, 5–19.

Furlong, J. (2013). Education – An anatomy of the discipline: Rescuing the university project? London: Routledge.

Krishnan, A. (2009). What are academic disciplines? Some observations on the disciplinarity vs. interdisciplinarity debate. NCRM Working Paper Series.

Whitty, G., & Furlong, J. (2017). Knowledge traditions in the study of education. In G. Whitty & J. Furlong (Eds.), Knowledge and the study of education: An international exploration (pp. 13–57).

Wyse, D. (2020). Presidential address: The academic discipline of education. Reciprocal relationships between practical knowledge and academic knowledge. British Educational Research Journal, 46(1), 6–25. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3597

Wyse, D., Brown, C., Oliver, S., & Pobleté, X. (2020). Education research and educational practice: The qualities of a close relationship. British Educational Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3626

Wyse, D., Smith, E., Selwyn, N. & Suter, L. (2017). Editor’s Introduction. In D. Wyse, E. Smith, N. Selwyn & L. Suter (Eds.) The BERA/SAGE Handbook of Educational Research. London: Sage.

[1] Or equivalent process in countries outside the UK.