Jane Gatley’s seminar on ‘Education based on the nature of knowledge’, hosted by CEPA and PESGB, is now available as an audio recording. Listen on Soundcloud.

Beyond ’employability’: Higher education that enables graduates to take a collectively-minded approach to work

Dr Peter Kahn (University of Liverpool)

13 November
2-3.30pm
EDEN 005

Eden Building, Hope Park, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, L16 9JD

2019 is the 30th Anniversary of the United Nations Convention on Children’s Rights (UNCRC, 1989). The Faculty of Education Early Childhood team and students, in collaboration with the Open Eye Gallery, Granby Children’s Centre, and Granby Winter Garden, will celebrate children’s rights with young children and their families through arts-based activities and exhibitions.

On Wednesday 6th November the event will include artistic and creative workshops, involving music, drawing, storytelling, photography, and cyanotypes. The artefacts created will be exhibited at the Open Eye Gallery on Saturday 9th November, giving us the opportunity to mark the occasion in an art-based way. The event is part of the Festival of Social Science, funded by the ESRC.

For more information, please contact Zoi Nikiforidou, or visit the Festival of Social Science event page.

Download the CEPA Newsletter for updates on our ‘Philosophy, Education, & Society’,  ‘Citizenship, Identity & Social Justice’, ‘Higher Education’, and ‘Education for Advantage’ research themes, compiled by @HopeCEPA co-directors Catherine O’Connell and David Lundie.

The Newsletter is also available on the Centre for Education & Policy Analysis page, where you will also find details of our seminar series.

The drive for educators, particularly those in schools and Academies serving areas of disadvantage, to critically reflect on school-based practice seeks to enhance educational outcomes for disadvantaged pupils and marginalised groups, both within a school and across a group of schools, and to secure career development for the individual teacher, in particular into leadership roles or through enhancing current leadership practice.

Our new module that supports this development, ‘Power, Politics, and Policy in Educational Leadership’, forms part of the MA Leading for Educational Advantage.

The MA has been designed, developed and written through collaboration between Hope University School of Teacher Education, CEPA, and Multi Academy Trusts in the North West of England as part of a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Partnership initiative to offer professional masters qualifications that are:

• current and relevant
• bespoke to context
• informed by current research and evidence

This new programme is designed primarily for serving professionals working in schools in Local Authorities (LAs), Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) and other educational settings serving disadvantaged communities who, already have a responsibility for leading or, are aspiring to a leadership role and who wish to study at Postgraduate Level.

Current and former students have said:

“It has changed my outlook and focused my thinking within my own practise. This has had a particular impact of my understanding of Pupil Premium from a SLT point of view. I have had impact on the school and therefore children in our school, by sharing the attachment theories and suggesting ways to support our disadvantaged LAC and PLAC through whole school training. It is my intention to also share the research and ideas behind PP funding and how we spend it in school, therefore helping other staff to gain the understanding that I have during this recent unit.”

“So far, the impact of the MA has been profound with regards to benefiting my overall professional practice. The first module gave me such a crucial understanding of ‘Attachment Theory’ and as a result I am now able to understand behaviours in relation to previous experiences that children may have. This has been incredibly beneficial for the pupil premium programme I lead at my school which has informed my daily practice and the way I approach each student. The second module based around ‘Policy’ has provided me with a valuable understanding of how policy is created and enacted. It is crucial to understand the wider aspect of policy and the challenges that may arise in order to fundamentally implement policy as successful as possible. I believe this has been imperative to my understanding and will be vital for my progress as a leader.”

For more details about the programme, please contact:
Dr Lynn Sampson Chappell, Head of Professional Partnership Development, School of Education, Liverpool Hope University.
Follow the link above to email or call 0151 291 3207.

Applications are invited to the post of Associate Professor in the School of Education at Liverpool Hope. Further details of the post, how to apply, and the job specification can be found here.

The @HopeCEPA seminar series for the coming year has been announced

What are the benefits for studying RE? How are these benefits – academic, economic, spiritual, moral, social, and cultural – perceived? What is the relationship between these perceptions and who studies RE?

David Lundie and Mi Young Ahn combined analysis of English secondary school data with survey research involving Yr 8 & 9 pupils and parents at secondary schools in Merseyside to explore these questions. You can read a summary of their findings here.

Next up in our series of research summaries, research into the perceived fairness of metrics in higher education by Catherine O’Connell, Cathal O’Siochru, and Namrata Rao.

Both teaching and research are subject to various metrics in the UK, most prominently the REF (Research Excellence Framework) and the TEF (yep, Teaching Excellence Framework).

There is much critical literature on these and the wider systems of accountability and performativity in which they sit, but O’Connell et al’s research focuses on local organisational practices and academics’ perceived fairness of these, drawing on the notion of procedural justice.

The summary is available to download here and contains links to related publications, such as this one in Studies in Higher Education.