Education Research

The School provides extensive research training and supervision on a range of themes including: curriculum, pedagogy and assessment; education management; school improvement; higher education; student & teacher identities; informal & workplace learning; inequality and social justice; the nature of professional expertise; the intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual aspects of personal experience and professional development; and the evolving practices and policy contexts of professional work.

There is a particular emphasis on rigorous interdisciplinary and critical perspectives with staff and students working in and across a range of disciplines.

We also run MPhil and PhD programmes in Interdisciplinary Policy Studies and Discourse & Communication. We are home to a range of research projects, funded by research councils (ESRC and AHRC) and major charities (e.g. Wellcome, Leverhulme and Nuffield).

Current/ recent PhD topics include: ‘”Stayers”: A qualitative study exploring why teachers and headteachers stay in challenging London primary schools’; ‘Exploring the role of race/ethnicity, class and gender in young people’s engagement with science through an intervention programme’; ‘Surgeons as Brokers? Exploring the professional identity of surgical educators’; ‘Passion and Resistance in Youth Work’; ‘The co-construction of ageing identities: a linguistic ethnography of older women’s talk and practices in a hair salon’; ‘The Development of Metaphor Comprehension in Arabic-Speaking Children’.