Category Archives: Education

Children, parents and screen-viewing: New evidence from the School for Policy Studies

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Russ Jago from the Centre for Exercise, Nutrition & Health Sciences discusses a recent paper in the International Journal of Behavioural Nutrition and Physical Activity on parent and child screen-viewing and its implications.

Professor Russ Jago - Professor of Paediatric Physical Activity and Public Health

Professor Russ Jago – Professor of Paediatric Physical Activity and Public Health

A body of evidence has shown that screen-viewing (watching TV, using the internet, playing games consoles) is associated with adverse health effects such as increased risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity among adults. Recent research has also shown that screen-viewing is associated with adverse health effects among children and adolescents such as increased risk of obesity, higher cholesterol levels and poorer mental well-being. Collectively these findings indicate that there is a need to understand children and adolescent’s levels and patterns of screen-viewing among children and adolescents and identify ways in which the screen-viewing levels of children can be reduced. To date the bulk of this work has focussed on older-aged primary school aged children and adolescents with a lack of information about the screen-viewing patterns of younger children. This gap is important because previous work has shown that screen-viewing patterns are established in early life and then track through childhood into adulthood. Thus, there is a need to examine levels of screen-viewing among children at the start of primary school and the key factors that are associated with these patterns.

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Learning from the sharp end: Education for sustainable development in small states

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Terra Sprague, Research Fellow, Graduate School of Education

Terra Sprague, Research Fellow, Graduate School of Education

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are quickly finding themselves at the sharp end of global climate change, yet they often get overlooked when it comes to international policy deliberations and decisions. So, why should we listen, and what can we learn?

When it comes to global policy deliberations about internationally agreed education targets and goals, such as the Education for All (EFA) goals and the education-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), small states have often found that their priorities are largely overlooked.

Michael Crossley, Professor of Comparative and International Education

Michael Crossley, Professor of Comparative and International Education

At the Education in Small States Research Group in the Graduate School of Education (GSoE), our recent research focuses upon the educational policy priorities of Commonwealth small states, and others with populations of up to 1.5 million. There are 32 of these states within the Commonwealth alone, generally concentrated in the Caribbean and Pacific regions, but with some additional members such as Botswana and Namibia. These states often share common factors such as isolation, remoteness, and susceptibility to natural disaster shock, but they are extremely diverse in terms of their cultures, languages, human development indicators and gross domestic product (GDP).

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Oral language and reading development: the dialectal divide

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Emma Bent, Visiting Fellow, Graduate School of Education

Emma Bent, Visiting Fellow, Graduate School of Education

Educational policy and documentation concerned with reading and literacy over the last 40 years has altered dramatically. The Bullock Report, a comprehensive review of reading and the use of English in the 1970s, recognised the linguistic diversity that exists within the English language. Crucially, it also recognised the strong sense of identity and belonging, both geographically and socially, that such dialects provide their speakers with. More recently, The Cox Report and The National Curriculum have moved away from such a sociolinguistic perspective and prioritised Standard English over other dialects.

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Education spending, pupil attainment and causality

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Professor of Economics Director of the Centre for Market and Public Organisation

Simon Burgess, Professor of Economics &
Director of the Centre for Market and Public Organisation

In these hard times, spending government money effectively is more important than ever. Last week Fraser Nelson challenged the effectiveness of spending in schools, one of the areas relatively protected from Coalition cuts. He said: “The biggest surprise, though, was the money: no matter how you split the figures, the amount spent didn’t seem to make the blindest bit of difference”, his reading of a report by Deloitte commissioned by the Department for Education.

What is the evidence? In fact, it is surprisingly difficult to establish the impact of spending more money on student achievement. This is partly due to shortage of data (researchers always want more data), but there is a more fundamental reason too. Continue reading →