Category: Secondary education

A new book for Earth Day: Taking A Close Look at Microfibres

Author Education and Childhood Research Group | Posted on

Earth Day (22 April 2026) saw the launch of a new children’s book, Taking a Close Look at Microfibres. Co-created by school pupils and researchers from UWE Bristol’s Science Communication Unit (SCU) and Education and Childhood Research Group (ECRG), the book supports children and teachers to explore an often invisible aspect of air quality: airborne microfibres.

The book is part of the Schools Under the Microscope project, a child-led citizen science project that invites pupils aged 9–14 to take part in real environmental research. Through hands-on investigation, creative inquiry, and collaboration with university researchers, children from England and Wales helped generate new knowledge while shaping an engaging educational resource for use in schools.

Exploring what’s in the air we breathe

While microfibres are increasingly well documented in water systems, far less is known about fibres in the air we breathe – particularly in school environments. The Schools Under the Microscope project set out to explore whether established citizen science methods, previously used in homes, could work meaningfully in classrooms.

Following an initial pilot with 90 pupils at May Park Primary School, Bristol the project expanded to include around 400 children across four schools. Together, pupils designed investigations, made predictions, prepared petri dishes, and positioned them around their schools for a two‑week sampling period. After collection, pupils used microscopes to count fibres, while researchers at UWE Bristol carried out further analysis and shared findings back with the schools.

This marked the first time data on airborne microfibres has been collected within school environments, offering valuable insights into both indoor air quality and the potential of citizen science in education settings.

Learning through participation and enquiry

The findings showed that microfibre levels in schools were similar to those found in homes, including a mix of natural and synthetic fibres – some even matching the colours of school uniforms. More importantly, pupils and teachers reported high levels of engagement and enjoyment throughout the research process.

The team found that although air pollution is often invisible, it becomes meaningful through hands-on activities.

From research to a children’s book

Children’s questions, observations, and reflections directly shaped the storyline and content of Taking a Close Look at Microfibres. The book is designed to open up discussion rather than provide simple answers, encouraging curiosity, critical thinking, and dialogue about environmental issues that affect everyday life.

Page from the book, Taking A Closer Look at Microfibres.

The illustrations were created by Luci Gorell Barnes, a socially engaged artist and arts-based researcher. Recycled plastics, fabrics, card, and paper were used to make the images – all materials known to shed microfibres. These materials were scanned and transformed into digital collages, visually reinforcing the book’s themes of materiality, pollution, and reuse.

The book is accompanied by free teacher notes and ten lesson plans, supporting cross-curricular learning in science, geography, citizenship, and sustainability education.

Launching on Earth Day – and beyond

The project also connects with wider work at UWE Bristol around sustainability and social justice. The research team is partnering with the Global Goals Centre to support the Better Uniform Campaign, which seeks to develop a more socially and environmentally just system for school uniforms across Bristol.

Access the free book and resources

Schools, teachers, and partners can access a free e‑copy of Taking a Close Look at Microfibres with resources for lessons and learning.

The team

Dr Margarida Sardo, Dr Ben Williams, Dr Verity Jones and Jacqui Warner.

Education, curriculum reform and the canary in the mine

Author Education and Childhood Research Group | Posted on

By Dr Sarah Whitehouse, Programme Leader for the International Doctorate in Education, and Senior Lecturer : Education and Humanities

I was reflecting on a keynote lecture delivered by Caroline Daly at the UCET (Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers) conference in November 2025. In her address, Daly offered a powerful metaphor for the current education system, suggesting that education is often treated like “a canary down a mine.” Too frequently, when outcomes are uneven or disappointing, attention is directed towards pupils or teachers – the canary – rather than towards the wider education system that shapes what is possible. This framing invites a necessary shift away from individual blame and towards systemic critique.

This observation resonates strongly in the context of the recent Curriculum Review led by Becky Francis, which raises fundamental questions about curriculum content, curriculum making and equity. The review marks a notable shift in emphasis and sits in contrast to developments in the other three nations of the United Kingdom. As someone who has taught in Wales, and who has experienced the rapid pace of policy change within its education system, I am particularly interested in how curriculum reform – whether radical or incremental – creates both opportunities and challenges for teachers.

The Welsh context offers an important case study. The rapid introduction of the Curriculum for Wales has afforded teachers significantly greater freedom to design locally responsive, bespoke curricula. In principle, this represents a progressive move away from prescriptive content towards professional trust, creativity and innovation. Teachers are positioned as curriculum makers rather than curriculum deliverers, with greater scope to respond to local contexts and pupil needs.

However, recent research by Estyn and the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) suggests that this increased autonomy is not without risk. Their findings indicate that the new curriculum may be exacerbating existing inequalities, particularly in relation to attainment and access to disciplinary knowledge in some subjects. While some schools and teachers are thriving within this flexible framework, others are struggling to ensure coherence, progression and equity.

A key tension emerges here. Many teachers in Wales have not historically been prepared – through initial teacher education or ongoing professional development – to act as curriculum designers. Innovation requires time, subject expertise and sustained support, yet these resources are unevenly distributed across schools. At the same time, schools continue to be held accountable through inspection and assessment systems that have not fully adapted to the scale and ambition of curriculum reform.

This raises critical questions for curriculum change more broadly. Freedom and flexibility alone do not guarantee equity. Without systemic investment in teacher education, subject knowledge and collaborative curriculum development, innovation risks deepening rather than narrowing inequalities. Daly’s metaphor reminds us that if the canary is struggling, the problem may not lie with the canary at all—but with the conditions of the mine.

School Art: Where Is It? A (re)exploration of the visual arts in secondary schools

Author Education and Childhood Research Group | Posted on

By Dr Will Grant, Associate Director of the School of Arts, UWE Bristol, and ECRG member

This blog post is a brief, informal introduction to the report School Art: Where Is It? (Fursman, Grant, & Wild 2024), which I recently co-authored with colleagues from UCL and Birmingham City University. The report revisits work undertaken by Dick Downing and Ruth Watson in their 2004 School Art: What Is It? report, and asks what has changed in the pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment of the visual arts in secondary schools over the preceding 20 years.

In 2004, Tate Gallery and the National Foundation for Education Research did something unusual. They decided to fund research into the substantive content of secondary school art classrooms, with a particular concern for engagement with contemporary arts practice in the sector. Given the brevity of the National Curriculum entry for Art and Design at the time (2003), it was very difficult to otherwise guess, without taking the time to ask, what rationales, pedagogies, and curricula art teachers across the country might be activating.

The resultant report, School Art: What is It? (Downing and Watson 2004), while adopting a loose methodology that might best be described as illustrative, became a defining record of practice typical in secondary art education that has persisted as a reference point across the decades following. Among its many observations, the report tells of very high levels of teacher agency, where individuals or collegiate departments of art teachers might take inspiration from a local gallery exhibition or their personal artistic practices, and others who centred curriculum on celebrating pupils’ opinions, creating safe spaces to build pupils’ self-belief. It also suggested that canonical artistic references were commonplace, predominately early 20th century sources assessed on technical accessibility. These references were very narrow, with only one non-European/American artist mentioned at all (Ana Bella Geiger), and only two further female artists noted in conventional school curricula (Georgia O’Keefe and Bridget Riley) across the interviews. In one comment especially memorable from my first encounter with the report (as a progressively-minded pre-service teacher), the authors note that:

“One of the more experienced teachers explained that she/he hadn’t the faintest idea what post-modern art was about, and doubted that anyone else did either, while another corroborated that view by admitting that she/he didn’t understand contemporary art.”

Downing and Watson 2004, 61

Having referenced this report in our work in pre-service teacher education and within our individual research activities for many years, Carol Wild (UCL), Jo Fursman (Birmingham City University), and I decided it would be a worthy exercise to repeat the School Art report twenty years after its original publication. We wanted to both pay homage to this rare example of empirical data collection in art classrooms and simultaneously explore the changes that may have occurred over the preceding decades. We knew, from our own experiences in the classroom, that a lot of contextual factors remained the same in 2024 as in 2004 – a National Curriculum (2013) of limited operational value, a lack of expendable art materials, and a tension between artistic freedoms and increasingly conformative pedagogic and assessment policies (Grant 2023). However, there had clearly been huge political, technological, and disciplinary shifts over this period, and we knew research into how these changes have impacted on English secondary school art education was extremely limited. It felt somewhat ridiculous that pre-service art teachers were still being asked to reference source material on ‘contemporary’ classroom practices published before they were born!

We replicated the methods of Downing and Watson as accurately as possible – not for the sake of scientific rigour (the data set too small and rich to bear out any meaningful statistical comparison), but to create reflective connections between then and now. Therefore, we went about interviewing 36 secondary school teachers of art from over 30 different schools, asking identical questions of their curriculum, its content, and influences. In our writing, we directly borrowed structure and phrasing from the first report, producing a palimpsest that could be considered an iterative companion piece to the 2004 publication.

In our report, School Art: Where is it? (Fursman, Grant & Wild 2024), we present in a dispassionate voice a record that we hope other researchers, writers, advocates and practitioners will assess as fair reportage on the nature of secondary school art curriculum content in 2024. We followed in the philosophy of the first report – seeking not answers, but ‘questions that might be worthy of addressing’ (Downing 2005, 275). Given some of our findings – the ahistorical persistence of ‘formal elements’ as uncontextualised framework for normative curricula, a collapse in professional agency (especially among early career art teachers), and a significant decline in sculptural practices – it was tempting to err into commentary critical of policy, paradigm, or practitioners’ priorities. This was especially true where our own research assumed a critical stance on school orthodoxies (Grant 2020, Wild 2013) but we knew the enduring value to the field of Downing and Watson’s (2004) report was its subtle, observational neutrality.

Aside from the concerns that might be drawn by some readers of School Art (2024), there was also much that might be celebrated in the voices of our interviewees. We found a deep, unanimous sentiment among art teachers that curriculum diversification was an urgent mission, and evidence that this intent was starting to manifest in classrooms (in 2024, 35% of the artists mentioned by interviewees as featuring on their curriculum were female). We also saw photography and digital media emerging, and an interest among teachers to employ contemporary artworks to open paradigmatic questions about the nature of art practice with their pupils.

As authors, we have been delighted to receive so much public interest in a report that was initiated from personal curiosity. It has been used, directly, as evidence of contemporary arts provision in the DfE’s ongoing Curriculum and Assessment Review, and we will be discussing the report further at a panel event during the National Society for Education in Art and Design’s annual conference on 19 June 2025.

References

  • Department for Education (2013) Art and Design Programmes of Study: Key Stage 3, National Curriculum in England. Department for Education; London.
  • Downing, D. (2005) School Art – What’s in it?, in The International Journal for Art and Design Education, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 269-276. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.2005.00450.x
  • Downing, D. & Watson, R. (2004) School Art: What’s In It? Exploring Visual Arts in Secondary Schools. National Foundation for Education Research; Slough. Available online here: https://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/school-art-whats-in-it-exploring-visual-arts-in-secondary-schools/ (last accessed 10th April 2025).
  • Fursman, J., Grant, W., & Wild, C. (2024) School Art: Where Is It? (Re)exploring Visual Arts in Secondary Schools. National Society for Education in Art and Design; Corsham. Available online here: https://www.nsead.org/resources/research-reports-and-reviews/school-art-where-is-it-2024/ (last accessed 10th April 2025).
  • Grant, W. (2020) Liberal ideals, postmodern practice: a working paradox for the future of secondary school art education in England?, in The International Journal for Art and Design Education, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 56-68. https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12228
  • Grant, W. (2023) Protecting Transformative Optimism in the Art Classroom: Exploring Aspirant Art Teachers’ Shifting Ideals. EdD Thesis: University of Glasgow. Available online here: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/84006/ (last accessed 10th April 2025).
  • Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (2003) The National Curriculum Programme of Study: Art and Design Key Stage 3. QCA; London.
  • Wild, C. (2013) Who Owns the Classroom? Profit, Pedagogy, Belonging, Power, in The International Journal of Art & Design Education, vol. 32, pp. 288-299. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.2013.12029.x

‘It’s our job to take the limits away’: A case study approach to exploring culture of teacher expectations in an English secondary school

Author Bristol Inter-disciplinary Group for Education Research | Posted on

Education Research from UWE reaches around the globe…

In this article, Dr Smith draws on her doctoral research, carried out in the Department of Education and Childhood at UWE, investigating the beliefs and practices of high expectation teachers.

Although Dr Smith’s EdD thesis was only submitted recently, it has already had global reach. One of her supervisors, Dr Richard Waller received an unexpected email from a researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research who wrote to say how impressed he was with the quality of Dr Smith’s research.

Having only had my thesis revisions accepted in June, I am still somewhat in a haze and only just beginning to reflect on my doctoral journey. I began my professional doctorate in education with a keen interest in extending my understanding and in improving practice: I wanted to generate professional knowledge that would have real impact. Achieving that goal was without doubt a challenging, but incredibly rewarding and enriching experience.

My professional interest in my research project was born from a sense of social injustice. Having taught in the state sector for over twenty years, I have been increasingly troubled by the concept of labelling and notions of fixed abilities that are prevalent in our education system. From the earliest stages of formal education, teachers are required to make predictions about future development of the children based on present attainment, as well as determining students’ academic ability. Children from lower socio-economic groups and from particular minority ethnic groups are over-represented in lower sets and streams, and allocation to these groups does not always match the level of ‘ability’ as designated by test scores. As children progress through school, attainment gaps widen between children from lower socio-economic groups and their peers, suggesting that schooling exacerbates inequalities in educational attainment.

This sense of injustice led me to explore the beliefs of ‘high expectation teachers’, and the practices through which teachers aim to build an inclusive learning environment, in addition to the ways they develop strategies that do not rely on pre-determined ability labelling. This exploration led me to understand that what constitutes a ‘high expectation’ teacher needed to be investigated from particular locations: through government policy; through theoretical models; through professional regulation and performance management, and through notions of professional identity. I learnt that these positions sometimes overlap, but at times, also conflict with one another.

The case study design of my research is focussed on one phenomenon, that of the beliefs and practices of high expectation teachers, and one bounded case illustrates the phenomenon. The case is specific, and bounded by time and location. It is intended to emphasize uniqueness through the in-depth exploration of the participants’ experiences. Within this bounded system are the relationships between people and events, and within those are differing perspectives, as the positions on what makes a ‘high expectation’ teacher are contradictory, and not universally agreed.

I used thematic analysis to analyse data collected through questionnaires, interviews and focus groups, but reflected that despite the in-depth nature of this analysis, the phenomena of high teacher expectation remained only partially scrutinised in terms of social justice. Therefore, the social concerns raised throughout my study are also explored through the theories of Bourdieu with the aim of making sense of the wider issues of inequality inherent in this study, particularly in the sense that habitus is helped by, and helps shape, pedagogical action.

My findings are that there needs to be a recognition that in education, socially advantaged interests and voices dominate in terms of social mobility agendas. Social cohesion is therefore a challenge as inequality rises from an education system tailored to white, middle-class values, and until we value the diversity of heritage in all its forms, we cannot hope for greater equity for our students. Furthermore, teachers tend to be granted space in the public domain only through technical competency. Findings also suggest that teachers must be able to be emotionally committed to different aspects of their jobs, as their sense of moral responsibility is at the core of their professional identity.

The research also challenges the assumption that academic achievement is paramount and suggests that there are many other measures of success, in which students discover and are celebrated for a particular talent, or a passion for something new. The ability to make choices should be a fundamental right and should be accessible to all as a result of social justice.

This presents a challenge in today’s economic and political climate. At the time of writing the thesis, 4.1 million children in the UK are living in poverty, a rise of 500,000 in the last five years, and in-work poverty has been rising even faster than unemployment, driven almost entirely by increasing poverty among working parents. In addition to the economic context our young people are living in, educational policy increases social inequities rather than reducing the poverty attainment gap. For example, additional funding has been allocated for new grammar school places, despite evidence that dividing children into the most ‘able’ and the rest from an early age does not appear to lead to better results for either group, including for the most disadvantaged students.

The financial landscape for most schools paints a bleaker picture than that for grammar schools. A further significant challenge for the education sector is the recruitment of the required number of teachers of sufficient quality and motivation, at a time of continued public pay restraint and rising student numbers. Similarly, spending on early education, Sure Start and the childcare element of Working Tax Credit fell by 21% from 2009–10 and 2012–13, with falls of 11% for early education, 29% for targeted support for childcare and 32% for Sure Start. Child Tax Credit and Child Benefit payments were frozen in financial terms. In addition to cuts to income support, community-based support services and to the funding of voluntary groups and services, this financial context may have an impact on children as they enter the school system.

Furthermore, Britain’s high-status professions remain dominated by the privileged; those from traditionally working-class backgrounds earn on average £6,800 less than colleagues from professional and managerial backgrounds. Although students in my study feel that they can ‘get ahead’ on merit, it could be suggested that British society is profoundly unfair. Education is crucial to change, but it cannot be considered in isolation if we are going to tackle the challenge of disadvantage. Education must be freed from its current constraints so that educators have the opportunity to develop every child’s personality, talents and abilities to the full.

Within the constraints of this wider context, one recommendation that arose from the study with the aim of creating a culture of high expectations is that a form of ‘high-integrity’ setting could be implemented in schools. In practice, strategies such as: making setting as subject-specific as possible; grouping students by attainment rather than perceived effort; regularly testing and moving students between sets, and using a lottery system when assigning borderline students to sets may help mitigate the consequences of attainment grouping. Schools, however, may be deterred from implementing more equitable grouping practices by perceptions of middle-class parental and student preferences for attainment grouping. A further complication raised in this study is that most teachers who currently teach in attainment groupings believe that mixed attainment groupings would create further barriers to progress.

A final reflection for me is on the complex and problematic nature of the barriers to creating a culture of high expectation. I entered into this research project with a rather idealistic notion that exploring one definition of high-expectation beliefs and teaching practices could lead to the creation of a culture of high expectation. The reality is far messier. In addition to my exploration of the contradictory definitions of what makes a ‘high expectation’ teacher, research discourse related to teachers tends to be prescriptive, rather than serious study of, or collaboration with, those prescribed to or portrayed. This resonates with my own professional experience, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to explore this complex phenomenon through several lenses, even though at times these lenses seemed somewhat elusive!

Dr. Julie Smith has recently completed her doctoral research into the beliefs and practices of high expectation teachers, in the Department of Education and Childhood under the supervision of Dr. Richard Waller, Dr. Nicola Bowden-Clissold and Dr. Sarah Chicken. She is also Vice-Principal at a secondary school in Gloucestershire.

Follow Dr Julie Smith on twitter

References:

Archer, L., Francis, B., Miller, S., Taylor, B., Tereshchenko, A., Mazenod, A., Pepper, D. and Travers, M. C. (2018) The symbolic violence of setting: A Bourdieusian analysis of mixed methods data on secondary school students’ views about setting. British Educational Research Journal. 44 (1), pp. 119–40.

Barnard, H., Collingwood, A., Leese, D., Wenham, A., Drake, D, Smith, E. and Kumar, A (2018) UK Poverty 2018 [online].York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Available from: https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/uk-poverty-2018 [Accessed 25 April 2019].

Blandford, S. (2018) Born To Fail? Social Mobility: A Working Class View. Suffolk: John Catt.

Bourdieu, P. (1973). Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction. In:R. Brown, ed., (1973) Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change: Papers in the Sociology of Education. London: Tavistock, pp. 71–112.

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction.London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1992) The purpose of reflexive sociology. In Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L., eds., (1992) An Introduction to Reflexive Sociology.Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.61–217.

Bourdieu, P. (2002) Habitus. In: Hiller, J. and Rooksby, E., eds., (2002) Habitus: A Sense of Place. Farnham: Ashgate, pp.27–34.Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J. C. (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage.

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology. 3 (2), pp. 77–101.

Clifton, J., and Cook, W. (2012). A long division: Closing the attainment gap in England’s secondary schools. London: IPPR.

De Boer, H., Timmermans, A. C. and P. C. van der Werf, M (2018) The effects of teacher expectation interventions on teachers’ expectations and student achievement: narrative review and meta-analysis. Educational Research and Evaluation. 24 (3-5), pp. 180-200.

Francis, B., Taylor, B., Hodgen, J., Tereshchenko, A. and Archer, L. (2018). Dos and don’ts of attainment grouping. London: UCL Institute of Education.

Friedman, S. and Savage, M. (2017) The Shifting Politics of Inequality and the Class Ceiling. Renewal.25 (2), pp. 31–40.

Gorard, S. and Siddiqui, N. (2016) Grammar Schools in England: a new approach to analysing their intake and outcomes. Project report. Durham: Durham University.

Harrison, N. and Waller, R. (2017) Success and Impact in Widening Participation Policy: What Works and How Do We Know? Higher Education Policy.30 (2), pp. 141–160.

Hart, S., Annabelle, D., Drummond, M. J. and McIntyre, D. (2004) Learning Without Limits. Berkshire: OUP.

Jussim, L. and Harber, K. (2005) Teacher Expectations and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Knowns and Unknowns, Resolved and Unresolved Controversies. Personality and Social Psychology Review. 9 (2), pp.131–55.

Lupton, R., Burchardt, T., Fitzgerald, A., Hills, A., McKnight, A., Obolenskaya, P. Stewart, K., Thomson, S., Tunstall, R. and Vizard, P. (2015) The Coalition’s Social Policy Record: Policy, Spending and Outcomes 2010-2015. Social Policy in a Cold Climate Report 4 [online]. Manchester: University of Manchester; London School of Economics and the University of York. Available from http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/spcc/rr04.pdf [Accessed 27 May 2019].

Nias, J. (1989). Primary teachers talking: A study of teaching as work. London: Routledge.

Rosenthal, R. and Jacobson, L. (1968) Pygmalion in the Classroom: teacher expectation and pupil’s intellectual development.New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Rubie-Davies, C. (2015) Becoming A High Expectation Teacher: Raising The Bar.Abingdon: Routledge.

Stake, R. E. (2005). Qualitative case studies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 443-466). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

UNCRC (1990) The United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child [online]. UK: Unicef.Available from: https://www.unicef.org.uk/what-we-do/un-convention-child-rights/ [Accessed 23 October 2017].

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