童颜视频

 Is the education system keeping pace with digital technologies? 

Research at the 童颜视频 has brought important understanding, not only to the roles technology is able to take in modern education, but the ways in which we understand the relationship between our education systems and the wider world of digitally-informed citizens. This is especially true for the education of the digital-natives moving through the school system.

In 2026, Michael Jopling, Professor of Education at the 童颜视频, published Understanding Postdigital Education, exploring how educational systems are struggling to keep pace with a world where technology is inextricably entangled in our daily lives.

The book examines the evolution of these changes since the turn of the century and challenges the traditional view that technology should simply be "integrated" into the classroom. Instead, Michael Jopling argues that we must fundamentally rethink how learning is approached in an age where digital technologies have already reshaped how young people gather information and interact with the world.

Research into postdigital education has often been preoccupied with system-level infrastructure and policy, rather than the messy realities of the postdigital school. Schools have been criticised for being both too digital and not digital enough. They are held simultaneously to be insufficiently digital to prepare students for the future and increasingly dominated by commercial providers and data-mining algorithms. As a result, the postdigital school takes many forms and new research was required to recognise and explore the effects on students and teachers.

On the launch of his book, Professor Jopling said: “One of the most pressing issues we face in all areas of education is the tendency of technology implementation to embed and even amplify existing disadvantages, rather than address or reduce them.

What digital systems might influence twenty-first century learning?

Education research at the 童颜视频 had already begun research on the ways new digital systems were influencing educational practices. While Professor Avril Loveless considered relationships between creativity, emerging technologies and learning in the wake of early social media and smart phone adoption patterns, the project Unbox21: Preparing school for twenty-first century learning caught the growing wave of social media and gaming cultures in 2013/14. The project involved 40 schools and specifically sought to explore the potential for computer games to support learning and teaching in science and to enhance twenty-first century learning skills. The project included a full programme of support and professional development activities for teachers to integrate gaming technologies into learning.

The research offered insights into the impacts, what worked well, the varied contexts and approaches, and the challenges faced by teachers in utilising such games in the classroom. The findings also reflected on the particular affordances of the games, and recognised significant impact on learning and teaching in classrooms and the professional development of teachers. The British Council then used the findings of this project to develop a course to help educators, school leaders and policy makers implement new approaches to support teaching and learning fit for the twenty-first century.

Read more about the Education research project  (2014)

How do we develop good mentors and mentoring strategies?

Mentoring research at the 童颜视频 has helped to shape the formation of a national mentoring infrastructure in England, and has informed and transformed multiple mentoring and mentor development programmes, nationally and internationally, replacing pathological, remedial approaches to mentorship with more developmental, non-evaluative approaches.

These advances have enhanced educators’ professional learning, development, effectiveness, wellbeing and retention, with resultant benefits for their learners, organisations and education systems.

Schools in England are legally required to provide mentors to trainee and newly qualified teachers, while mandatory or voluntary mentoring schemes exist for trainee, newly qualified and established professionals across multiple global contexts. However, despite evidence that mentorship can significantly enhance professional learning and development, work effectiveness, wellbeing and retention, the optimum benefits of mentoring are rarely realised.

Research led by the 童颜视频's  helped to explain why the root difficulties in under-resourcing, weak approaches to mentor selection and mentor-mentee matching, the lack of appropriate training for both mentors and mentees, and the absence of appropriate regulatory frameworks. 

What is judgementoring?

Judgementoring is an excessively directive and judgemental form of mentoring typified by mentors’ over-reliance on a strategy of providing evaluative feedback on mentees’ ‘performance’.

Professor Andrew Hobson and Dr Angi Malderez coined the term ‘judgementoring’ for the practice, which they had seen caused by the misappropriation of mentoring to suit political agendas. Their research shows that judgementoring, and the widespread use of mentoring as a remedial strategy to address the perceived under-performance of teachers, impedes the development of safe, trusting relationships and, in turn, mentees’ willingness to seek mentors’ support for their professional development.

Judgementoring stunts mentees’ professional learning, impairs their wellbeing and, for trainee and newly qualified teachers at least, detrimentally impacts their retention in the profession. 

What is the ONSIDE mentoring framework?

ONSIDE is a framework for successful and beneficial mentoring that can be used across all professional development. Research by Professor Andy Hobson showed that the benefits of mentorship will tend to be maximised where mentoring is:

• Offline (i.e. separated from line-management),
• Non-judgemental,
• Supportive,
• Individualised,
• Developmental and
• Empowering.

The ONSIDE acronym also helpfully emphasises the importance of a mentor being on their mentee’s side through acting as confidant, ally and advocate. 

In contrast to remedial, evaluative, and directive models of (judge)mentoring, mentoring was reconceptualised as a collaborative, non-judgemental and progressively non-directive strategy for promoting professional development and wellbeing, providing a safe space for mentees to access support from ONSIDE mentors, without fear of repercussions.

Professor Hobson and his colleague Professor Bronwen Maxwell (Sheffield Hallam University) have mapped out a broader ‘mentoring substructure and superstructure’ that can provide optimal support for mentorship from the organisations that they serve. This centres on a strong organisational commitment to mentoring, and requires a supportive mentoring superstructure, which comprises elements of the wider educational, social, economic, cultural, political and ideological contexts that together provide favourable conditions for establishing and maintaining effective mentoring substructures. 

The 童颜视频’s mentoring research has contributed to the development of a national teacher mentoring infrastructure in England. The ONSIDE and mentoring substructure and superstructure frameworks have become core features of a new Education and Training Foundation Mentoring Framework and associated Mentor, Mentee, and Organisational Leader Guides for the Further Education sector. The ONSIDE mentoring framework is also used, for example: by the UK’s flagship Institute of Education, at University College London; by Vilnius University (Lithuania), in a three-year pilot NQT induction programme hosted by the National Agency for Education; in a faculty mentoring scheme at Eotvos Lorand University (Hungary); the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD), in its development of a national Teacher Education Curriculum Framework; the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, in the development of online mentor training for employers providing industry placements for students following T-level qualifications; and many other universities nationally and internationally, including Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Oslo.

Research into classroom practice and school systems 

Research in Education at the 童颜视频 is developed alongside our professionally-focused teacher training course delivery and the work of our Higher-education-focused Centre for Teaching and Learning.

This has created an iterative and symbiotic relationship with the wider profession and one that we are deeply involved with. Our research and its practical testing and application helps support many aspects of the teaching world as well as supporting for academic colleagues in relation to learning and teaching enhancement and innovation.

What are the best ways for primary teachers to use textbooks?

A 2023 童颜视频 project into the use of maths textbooks in primary education found that textbooks were valuable when used with flexibility, recommending that leadership should:

• Enable teachers to be involved in decisions about which scheme to adopt and how / when to use it. 
• Develop a bank of ‘approved’ resources to tie in with the school’s mathematical approaches. 
• Examine teacher workload involved in curating, creating, and adapting curriculum resources. 

Textbook use has been somewhat controversial in primary mathematics in England, with textbooks tending to take a marginal role rather than being the main basis for instruction. Primary teachers have traditionally curated curriculum resources from a range of places. While there has been some concern about the quality of some resources, there has been little focus on developing high quality primary mathematics textbooks. Previously available textbooks were assessed as unstructured, simple, and routine, with a focus on repetition of procedures rather than application and investigation. 

Following longstanding concerns about maths attainment, the Department for Education (DfE) had invested substantial funding from 2016 in providing primary schools in England with support to purchase DfE-approved textbook-schemes for teaching mathematics. This was a bold and interesting move. Concerns from the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted) had in its earlier inspections suggested teachers were over-reliant on such textbooks. This was a substantial change, organisationally, culturally, and pedagogically, from what was happening in many primary schools. 

The multi-survey approach addressed school and teacher level differences in systematically analysing where, why and how, schools use different curriculum resources. It also identified the relative influence of multiple factors, including funding, on adopted teaching approaches.

The project focused on teaching and learning in primary mathematics (5–11-year-olds) in England and proved an important study. While the DfE had ear-marked match-funding to schools to buy in ‘approved’ textbooks, little was known about the impact of this on choices made ‘on the ground’ nor was there a comprehensive picture of the landscape of resource use. This limited the scope for evidence-driven pedagogy and policy.

The research sought to positively influence policy decisions, informing future funding models and training provision related to textbooks. It provided a clear evidence base to support school leaders in making crucial purchasing, training, and school-policy decisions.

Recommendations for primary maths textbook introduction and use 

Recommendations in the final report included advice for:

• Department of Education 
  • Consider fewer, full or majority-funded, strategically targeted, funding initiatives. 
  • Tailor initiatives to ensure accessibility and applicability for smaller schools. 
  • Extend the Textbook Assessment Criteria to cover a wider range of curriculum resources. 
• School Leaders 
  • Enable teachers to be involved in decisions about which scheme to adopt and how / when to use it. 
  • Develop a bank of ‘approved’ resources to tie in with the school’s mathematical approaches. 
  • Examine teacher workload involved in curating, creating, and adapting curriculum resources. 
• Researchers
  • Deepen understanding of uptake and attrition patterns in the DfE textbook-funding, to enhance the implementation of future initiatives. 
  • Develop a taxonomy of quality to assess and assure current and future educational resources. 
  • Ensure future research is inclusive of smaller and rural schools and those with mixed-age teaching.

Read more about the Education research project, 

 Creating opportunities for people in education

Changing mindsets: giving children belief in their own potential

What is Mindset? Psychologists Carol Dweck and Carol Diener began developing the theory of Mindset from the late 1970s, with Dweck popularising the theory in her book Mindset: The new psychology of success (2006).

Early work on learned helplessness in 1978 and 1980 by Diener and Dweck looked at why bright children might give up when facing difficult tasks, recognising that many blamed a lack of inherent intelligence or talent. 

The Mindset idea in education is based on an idea that fixed beliefs about the nature of intelligence and academic ability can unfairly prevent achievement. It divides 'growth mindset' from 'fixed mindset'. The former considers that intelligence is developed, can grow or shrink, that learning takes effort for anyone and everyone and that failures are a natural, understandable route to development. Conversely, fixed mindsets consider intelligence inate, that people are born with it to a greater or lesser extent and that 'gifted' individuals will find learning straightforward and failure free.

Related to this is a study of Stereotype threat, the research for which stems from Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson in 1995. This considers that an individual's underperfomance can come from the perceived pressure from established stereotyping. The determination not to fall into stereotypes associated with, for example, race, ethnicity, gender or age, can bring about anxieties that ultimately do bring about below normal performances in a range of pursuits.

The 童颜视频 was a key partner in the "Changing Mindsets" project, funded by the Office for Students and led by the University of Portsmouth. It brought a number of universities together with an aim to support pupils to develop this 'Growth Mindset', a belief that intelligence is not a fixed characteristic and can be increased through effort and to consider the value within a classroom situation where measures were taken to alleviate a sense of 'stereotype threat' and 'fixed mindset.'

Research (Good et al., 2003; Blackwell et al., 2007) had suggested that holding this belief would enable pupils to work harder and achieve better results. Researchers working within the Learning and Teaching Hub took staff and students through a process in which they explored their own beliefs around the nature of ability and intelligence. From here, they explored strategies to develop a 'growth mindset', inclusive behaviours, high expectations and enabling language for all learners.

The Changing Mindsets project sought to test whether and how this led to improved academic attainment.

The project consisted of two separate interventions: one which taught pupils directly about the malleability of intelligence and another professional development course that trained teachers on approaches to developing and reinforcing growth mindsets through their teaching.

Key conclusions included:

1. Pupils who received the growth mindset workshops made an average of two additional months' progress in English and maths.
2. Pupils whose teachers received the professional development intervention made no additional progress in maths compared to pupils in the control group.
3. Free School Meal (FSM)-eligible pupils who were involved in the professional development intervention gained a better understanding of the malleability of intelligence;

The research found that combined growth mindset and stereotype threat interventions significantly reduced biased thinking and enhanced student engagement. While fostering increased student agency and resilience, the study concluded that these interventions serve as part of a broader, long-term strategy rather than a singular solution for eliminating institutional degree awarding gaps.

Read more about the 童颜视频 research on  

Changing mindsets and becoming gritty: Mature students’ learning experiences in a UK university and beyond

童颜视频 researchers , publishing further qualitative research findings in 2022 that focused particularly on the experiences of mature students. Emerging findings identified how mature students developed "grit", defined as ‘trait-level perseverance and passion for long term goals’ (Angela L. Duckworth and Patrick C. Quinn, 'Development and Validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit–S)', Journal of Personality Assessment 2009) in relation to a growth mindset. The importance of students’ development of grit was thought to be particularly relevant during world crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Equality for young people of school age across the globe

The 童颜视频's researchers in the field of education have worked on the equalities associated with school age children, and how learning and teaching can impact their opportunities in life.

Rights-based education researchers have worked with international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to improve education outcomes and sexual health across the world.

Our research provided insights into how to support and sustain pathways out of poverty for street connected and marginalised youth. Projects have included  and . Extreme poverty, increased rates of HIV, and high numbers of single headed households has forced many children and young people to live and work in informal settlements, where street connected girls face multiple risks. They have often moved to escape abuse or neglect in dysfunctional families, but for many their wellbeing and the success of interventions rely on the support they receive from families and peers on the street. In order to understand the risks and vulnerabilities in their complex lives, street connected girls and their families need to be treated as active participants in research, so interventions take into account the discrimination they face and the support that helps them in their journeys from street into school. Dr Vicky Johnson conducted participatory research with street connected girls and sought to understand strategies for their rehabilitation and reintegration through their life histories depicting their journeys to the street.

In other work, hundreds of thousands of teachers and young people across the world were  given a voice in education through The Quality Education Project (QEP), led by Professor David Stephens, which focused on 300 primary schools in four sub-Saharan African countries, and resulted in the implementation of new policies towards teaching-learning. Most importantly the work aimed to be established, embedded and sustainable. As one principal in Zambia said: “I do not look at QEP as a project. A project has a life-span. Projects come and go, QEP is a programme. It has come to stay. It is an integral part of our work and life at the College”

How do we consider human rights in the early years?

In the First Steps. Human rights in the early years project, Amnesty International funded researchers to produce a pack of activities and discussion prompts to support the teaching of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in early years settings. 

The aims of the project were to:

• unpick the articles of the UDHR and make them accessible to young children with the support of the adults who care for them.
• establish the language of human rights from an early age.
• extend the concept of human rights to include all people everywhere – to show that children have their own rights and to help them explore and voice these rights.
• show that with these rights come responsibilities; rights belong to everyone, which sometimes means that we can’t have what we want at the expense of someone else.
• provide a resource for early years practitioners both to explore the articles with children and to challenge and extend their own understanding.
• remind practitioners and children that we should not take rights for granted.
• influence and enhance general practice in early years settings, such that the resources are a starting point for developing further activities.
• mesh the principles of the UDHR into every aspect of early years practice.

The resource that was produced through the research was developed around five themes:

• Feelings – The right to have our own thoughts and ideas. The right to make up our own minds and to share our ideas with others. The right to be treated fairly.
• Bodies - The right not to be hurt. The right to feel safe and be free.
• Relationships and Belonging – The right to meet our friends. The right to choose to join in or not. The right to belong.
• Wellbeing – The right to be looked after. The right to enjoyment. The right to rest and relax. The right to peace.
• Choice and Voice – The right to believe what we want to believe and the right to express this. The right to participate.

Launched in 2017 and distributed to early years settings in the UK, the resource sparked creative and interesting discussions with children and communicate rights and responsibilities in an accessible and inspiring way.

Negotiating the transition from rurality to higher education in Southern Africa

Another exemplary research project demonstrated the numerous challenges for students from rural contexts in accessing university, including linguistic, cultural and technological barriers and divides.

The research also highlighted the deeply rooted historical effects of colonialism and apartheid, which continue to shape the educational pathways of young people in rural areas in South Africa, through severe educational and infrastructural constraints and enforced mobilities. However, what researchers sought to make more visible, were the rich and diverse lives of students from rural areas, including their extensive cultural and local knowledge, their roles and responsibilities within communities, the importance of familial and community support. These funds of knowledge were critical to successful transitions to higher education. Yet these were often ignored or unrecognised by higher education institutions, making transitions far more difficult.

The research also identified how university learning environments and staff within them do not always acknowledge or value the knowledges and skills that students have developed in their rural communities or the distinctiveness of their home languages, prior educational experiences and trajectories. This was seen to lead to difficulties in participating in teaching and learning and in the social fabric of university. Whilst many of the challenges of widening access were acknowledged in interviews with senior and academic staff, there continue to be powerful structural and cultural constraints and resistance that frustrate opportunities to decolonise curricula and teaching practices. In our study, students from rural contexts wanted to be recognised as key contributors to knowledge production and to learning and teaching activities that are relevant for all students. These experiences have implications for university policies on education and student wellbeing in South Africa, other Southern African contexts, UK and globally.

Narrative research in Education 

Professor Ivor Goodson and Professor Avril Loveless were instrumental in shaping research in Education at the 童颜视频 over some twenty years. Together they edited Explorations in Narrative Research (Sense, 2012), and published works individually that had impact across the academic field and within the educational professions worldwide.

While at 童颜视频, Professor Ivor Goodson was awarded the , he founded and was editor of the , worked in universities in Europe, Canada and the USA, and held visiting positions in several countries, notably at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Sciences Po - L'Institut d'études politiques (IEP) de Paris and Stanford University in the USA.

He led on the Erasmus Intensive Programme, Education for Democratic Intercultural Citizenship which aimed to enhance cooperation between European universities and develop a democratic intercultural citizenship, focusing on forging collaboration between students and teachers and promoting social, cultural and political aspects in a multi-national context.

A developer of narrative theory in an educational context, Goodson considered that life stories are a crucial ingredient in what makes us human. In Developing Narrative Theory: Life Histories and Personal Representation (2012) he gave a growing discipline firm theoretical underpinning, looking at the contemporary need to study life narratives and discussing different forms of narrativity. Goodson posited that, rather than there being a singular form of narrative or an infinite range of unique and idiosyncratic narratives, there were in fact clusters of narrativity and particular types of narrative style, which he grouped as: Focussed Elaborators; Scripted Describers; Armchair Elaborators; and Focussed Describers.

His wider work impacted education as he examined whether there is a need for serious consideration of alternatives to a neoliberalist approach to education, suggesting that we may be witnessing the terminal decline of the current wave of neoliberal reforms. While at the 童颜视频 his publications considered a move towards a notion of curriculum as social construction, considering that the curriculum was being used as a response to nation building and the formation of a national identity at a time when globalisation was posing new threats to such identities.

Professor Goodson's collaborative PROFKNOW project received £1 million in funding from the European Union at a time when European societies were changing in different ways: in terms of a knowledge-based society as well as in demographic and cultural changes. The project  sought to compare professional work and life in different European contexts within and between the professions of teaching and nursing.

On the basis of the research, a conceptual framework for analyses of professional knowledge in restructuring organisations was presented. 

Great success was achieved in terms of dissemination and recognition. The findings from the PROFKNOW project were widely disseminated through published journal articles and two definitive professional education books. During this project, Professor Goodson was presented with the inaugural Michael Huberman Award for Outstanding Scholarship on the Lives of Teachers by the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Find out more about research excellence at the 童颜视频