Author: School of Education University of Bristol

The impacts of Covid-19 on basic education: How can Ghana respond, cope, and plan for recovery?

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Author and teacher Kenneth GyamerahBlog post by Kenneth Gyamerah, Professional Teacher and Development Consultant. MSc in Education (Policy and International Development) from the School of Education,  University of Bristol. Kenneth is a Chevening Scholar and a Global Youth Ambassador for Education.

With the global attention on the health implications, it is worth highlighting that the Coronavirus pandemic has triggered an unprecedented immediate global education emergency (Srivastava 2020). Taking some key learning experiences from disease outbreaks such as Ebola and SARS, it is apparent that the impact of COVID-19 on education will be critical for countries that have low economic resilience, inadequate technological infrastructure, limited budget for education , and high rates of dropouts. (more…)

Coronavirus: 14 simple tips for better online teaching

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Today’s guest blog article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Kyungmee Lee, Lancaster University

The past few days have seen increasing numbers of schools and universities across the world announce that they are moving to online-only learning. Hundreds of thousands of teachers are busy working to move their face-to-face lessons online. Designing online courses takes significant time and effort.

(more…)

The Document Summary Charts!

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The Document Summary Service, School of Education

Blog post by Helen Aberdeen, Director of the Document Summary Service & Bristol Guide, School of Education, University of Bristol.

Now we are well into 2020 and spring is in our sights, it is a good time not just to look forward, but also to take stock of the year which has gone.

One of the things which I like to do as Director of the Document Summary Service here at the University of Bristol is to take a look at the ‘Top ten’ – i.e. the summaries which had the most downloads from our subscribers over the last year. If you are a subscriber, it may be interesting to see if your interests align with those of the subscriber community as a whole. If you are not yet a subscriber, I hope that this overview will give you a flavour of the wide-ranging scope of the summaries and tempt you to join us in 2020. (more…)

Living by the evidence

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Professor Harvey Goldstein, School of Education, University of Bristol

Author Professor Harvey Goldstein, School of Education, University of Bristol 

In public discourse it has become common to claim that a programme or policy is “evidence informed”. Indeed, it is often felt sufficient merely to state that a particular decision is “evidence informed”, rather than describing the nature and quality of the underlying evidence.

The move to base public policy decisions on the best scientific evidence is certainly welcome and has been inspired and developed by initiatives such as the Cochrane Review in medicine and the Campbell Review in the social sciences, which rely upon systematic reviews of research. In this brief article I would like to explore the contemporary scene and how evidence is used or misused. (more…)

School accountability by Progress 8: A critique of Conservative and Labour proposals

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Blog post by Professor George Leckie, Dr Lucy Prior, and Professor Harvey Goldstein, School of Education, University of Bristol

The Conservatives and Labour hold different views on the future of England’s system of school accountability by Progress 8. However, both parties’ thinking is at odds with the research evidence.

Over the last 30 years, successive governments have held secondary schools to account for their GCSE results via national school performance tables (for a review see Leckie & Goldstein, 2017). In 2016 the Conservatives replaced their longstanding ‘5A*–C’ school performance measure – the percentage of pupils with five or more GCSEs at grade C or higher – with Progress 8, a ‘value-added’ measure of the average pupil progress made between key stage 2 SATs and GCSE. This long-argued-for shift in measuring school performance reflects the fact that simple school differences in GCSE results say more about differences in the types of pupil taught in different schools than differences in the effectiveness of the education provided by those schools. (more…)

Welcome to the new School of Education blog!

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Bruce McFarlane Head of School of EducationSchool of Educa
Professor Bruce Macfarlane
Head of School,
School of Education

Author: Professor Bruce Macfarlane, School of Education, University of Bristol

This will be a place where we can share our ideas about education and the work we are all engaged in: from teaching students, carrying out research and connecting with our community partners.

Not only that we will be exploring the process of  helping our students through their academic journey with the School of Education, discussing exciting innovations in Seminars, student Open Days and events, guiding and shaping future teachers and educationalists, plus hearing from our dedicated and inspirational students themselves. (more…)