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Snow-dusted salutations and tinsel-tinged tidings to all our readers, authors, curators and guest editors around the globe. In this, the ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog’s tenth anniversary year, I look back over the past twelve months of critically compelling BB contributions, including the 10 years of the ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog collection we have been running throughout the year.

This end-of-year post honours our authors’ and editors’ creativity, critical insight and passionate purpose that have propelled the ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog to its place as one of the most pre-eminent international blogs for educational research. With an archive of more than 1,878 posts, the BB continues to inspire, inform, provoke and engage researchers, practitioners, policymakers, educational leaders and students across the educational landscape. This year alone, we have published 227 posts and our authors have attracted more than 255,576 page views from readers in 210 of the 239 countries and territories that Google Analytics gathers data on.

This year’s banquet of bite-sized breakthroughs includes:

• The research excellence framework (REF) 2029: Threat or opportunity for early career researchers?
• A century of educating Britain’s political elite: privilege masquerading as meritocracy?
• Reflecting on education policy from across the UK
• Breaking the silence: Gaza, scholasticide and the struggle for academic freedom
• How can schools convince boys that emotional awareness is important?
• Tracing the footsteps of anti-racism: from my journey to our collective responsibility
• Building resilience in Northern Ireland’s student teachers: the role of emotional intelligence
• Disempowering imposterism in higher education
• Breaking the link between poverty and lower educational outcomes: some reflections from Wales
• Asking teachers to clean kids teeth is still a bad idea, and here’s why
• What do we know about widening participation at universities in Scotland: and why does it matter?
• Beyond employability: rethinking the purpose of higher education
• Creating opportunities for learning across subjects through the Titanic disaster
• Defying gravity in wicked workplaces
• Unlocking civic potential: insights from the launch event of the OECD’s report on higher education and regional development

True to form, it’s been another fast-paced year for our editorial team. Over the past 12 months, we have published 10 special issues:

• Far away from the ivory tower
• Flipping the deficit narrative: Working-class people in UK higher education
• Reimagining a just early childhood education and care sector in England: Voices from the margins
• Seeking a new paradigm for antiracist multicultural education
• Should I stay or should I go? International perspectives on workload intensification and teacher wellbeing
• The place of the EdD in personal and professional transformation
• Potential pathways towards an integrated tertiary education system in England
• Advancing pedagogic research across disciplines: Innovations, challenges and best practice
• Beyond ‘navel gazing’: Autoethnography as a catalyst for change
• Revisiting the Children’s Plan: Towards a new manifesto for tackling early years inequality

We have added another collection of posts to the widely welcomed and downloaded ½¿É«µ¼º½ Bites teaching resources:

• ½¿É«µ¼º½ Bites, issue 12: Education and the environment

Our ongoing ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog collection on Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to deliver fresh, timely content. With more excellent posts than we can showcase here, we encourage you to explore this collection. In addition to this, we have added three new ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog collections.

• The Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029
• Curriculum: Theory, policy and practice
• ½¿É«µ¼º½ Conference 2025

So, what other dazzling dispatches have danced their way into our inbox this year? Gert Biesta addresses, head-on, the utility of simplistically understanding education as an ‘evidence-based profession’, while former Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Charles Clarke, asks readers to face up to the dilemmas created for policy makers by a move to an integrated tertiary education system in England.  

In these conflict-ridden times, carrying out ‘ethical research’ in war zones goes beyond my imaginative capacity yet is brilliantly and sensitively handled by Iryna Kushnir and Oksana Zabolotna. Kelsey Shanks, one of our guest writers for the 10 years of the ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog anniversary collection, rethinks the role of education in post-conflict recovery. And if both pieces confront, disturb and provoke you into reaching down for your slippers, then please read Jacob Frimann and Mark Leather’s sensitive take on the role universities can play in providing a vital refuge from challenging home environments.  

Across the four nations, the topic of the curriculum continues to inspire debate and contestation from leading writers in the field, including Dominic Wyse, Mark Priestley, Savanagh Gill, Lee Elliot-Major, Chris Rolph and Alfred Kitawi and David Scott.  Catherine Hughes’ post asks to what extent Design Technology (DT) can be saved before it needs resuscitation? If it is curriculum evolution or revolution you are after, then reading opposing posts from Sarah Seleznyov and Zongyi Deng may help you to decide between the two.  And if you are still teetering, then read the call from Reece Sohdi to ‘reimagine’ a curriculum with decolonial values embedded, a theme resonating with ½¿É«µ¼º½â€™s current President Marlon Moncrieffe’s ideas about the impact of British colonial legacy on knowledge validation and its curricula ramifications. 

Engaging explorations on educational technology come in all shapes and sizes.  Safe guarding, unsurprisingly, is one of many field-related strands, adeptly dealt with by Marta Estelles and Andrew Doyle, with their framework to understand educational responses to digital technologies. The role of simulation in interprofessional education (IPE) is handled adeptly by Joanna Wing Yan Yeung, as is the topic of virtual reality by Ervi Liusman, while Rob Reynolds deploys discerning dexterity to deal with the topic of youth workers’ questions about digital practice.

The ½¿É«µ¼º½ special issue on early childhood education and care has generated exceptional writing this year, including that of Sara Mendes, who argues for greater recognition of nannies in education policy making.  Other perspicacious pieces come from Jenny Robson, Kristine Alexandra, Hongyan Zhang, Cecilia Zuniga-Montanez and Elena Lisauskaite, Cristina McKean and Claudine Bowyer-Crane, Sara Bonetti and Rob Newton and Laura Gilbertson. There is also a shrewd and incisive post from Leonie Butler and Jessica Whiteley on the complex problem of education and care for babies and the roles independent nurseries can play.  

With the wind and rain blasting the windows of my garden office as I write this, I need little reminding of how both climate change and sustainability have inspired thundering contributions from many this year, including Haira Gandolfi, Elizabeth Rushton and Nicola Walshe and Chung-Shing Chan, Wong Shing Yan and XU Yuan. Young people’s accounts of schools’ uneven responses to their climate justice activism is particularly salient and impressively handled by Eve Mayes, Dani Villafana, Sophie Chiew, Netta Maiava, Natasha Abhayawickrama and Rachel Finneran.

Silhouette Bushay’s disturbing piece on the extent to which British Schools provide safe spaces for Black girls is but one of many posts we have published this year on racism, equality, diversity and inclusion.  In part, this explosion of posts is due to an intellectually dazzling BB special issue on (worth reading Carle-Ria Rowell’s piece on working class knowledges in university curricula and Nysha Chantel Givan’s post on Black working-class representation). Making teaching an anti-racist profession is a call not to be ignored by Heather Smith, Vini Lander and Lydia Wysocki or related calls coming from Denise Miller, Diane Warner, Feyisa Demie and Nadia Talukder. Antonious Ktenidis tackles the multi-thorned issue of ablism in schools; Rebecca Fish and Alison Wilde write about class-based disablism in the academy, and there are riveting reflections on special educational needs and disabilities from Sam Dexter, Ruth Gilbert, Kate Lewis and Will Farr and Alan Marsh.  

For those interested in language provision, there are deeply reflective pieces from Ian Cushing and David Roxburgh, tightly reasoned thinking from Seyat Polat and Sarah Desiree Lange on effective multilingualism in primary schools, and a particularly insightful contribution from Arlene Holmes-Henderson, Lilah Grace Canevaro and Mirko Canevaro asking ‘How classist is Classics’?  

Teacher education continues to fuel the ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog with compelling commentary from Rachel Lofthouse, Franz Hoeritzauer and Lindsey Finch, Babak Dadvand, Jo Lampert and Clare Brooks, Michele Vincent, Mirela Scortescu and Simona Sava. And there is a ‘must read’ piece from Megan Stephenson, Aimee Quickfall and Phil Wood on the Ofsted inspection toolkits and inspections of early years, schools, further education and skills providers and initial teacher education in England.  

Teacher mental health and workload has sparked illumination from many, including Rhiannon Packer, Gwen Morgan and Rachel Sidoli; Moira Hulme, Gary Beauchamp, Jeffrey Wood and Carole Bignell; Shirley Gray and Deborah Holt; Amanda S. Frasier; Sara Jayne Long and Fiona Longmuir, Tim Delany, Jane Wilkinson and Jo Lampert. Ben Arnold and Mark Rahimi  write about mental health issues experienced by those in school leadership, and Greg Dempster examines survey findings in Scotland on the working hours work challenges and the declining desirability of headship in Scotland, while Heather Marshall writes about educational leadership and workplace aggression in schools. One solution to the issues these authors write about is, perhaps, to improve the ways in which early career teachers and assistants can work together – a topic sensitively handled by Geoff Lewis, and I encourage you to read an intriguing and nuanced post by Emily Macleod on teacher recruitment that touches on so much that other writers on this overall topic have addressed.  

In the special issue on the professional doctorate in education (EdD), there are sharply argued posts from Nikki Anghileri, Lisa Panford and Elizabeth Cahill about the benefits (and challenges) of this doctoral research degree, and the whole collection is really worth reading.  We have seen more articles than ever, this year, on research methodology, including these from Eleanor Long on creative methods, Marianne Talbot on autoethnography, and an astute piece from Abiola Odunro about his autoethnographic study on the lack of Black male teachers in the UK. The role of women in sports and sports education is another emerging ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog theme with an impressive post from Laila Nahari. The topic of apprenticeships is starting to gain substantial footing within the BB landscape, with some clear headed thinking from Jordan Allison and Mohammed Abdullahi, David Ellis and Funmilola Vanessa Odofin.

Finally in this review, I want to take a moment to acknowledge some other outstanding contributions that deserve attention: Towards inclusive futures through trans-inclusive education: The trans-inclusivity seminar series at University College London (UCL); Challenging the narrative: Auto-captioning and diversity in higher education speech recognition; The role of place in educational disadvantage; Could cross-education sector collaboration around ‘scholarship’ boost educational research in the UK?; and To be a musician or a music teacher?

As always, we welcome future contributions from teachers, practitioners, academics, policymakers and all who have a stake in lifelong learning. While we continue to attract writers from the four nations of the UK, we also welcome contributions from all parts of the globe. If you have an idea for a future blog post, please contact members of our editorial team. The ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog is open to anyone to make a submission, and our editorial team looks forward to working with an even more diverse group of contributors next year. Our downloadable ½¿É«µ¼º½ Bites teaching resources continue to grow in popularity, as do our ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog special issues, with more issues planned for the coming year. If you would like to curate one of either of these collections, please contact a member of the BB’s editorial team or ½¿É«µ¼º½â€™s Publications Manager, Hannah Marston.ÌýÌýÌý

We hope you have enjoyed this annual BB round-up and we are sorry – particularly to the authors whose work could not be included here – that we can’t cover all of the many themes and blog posts that the BB has engaged with over the past 12 months. However, we do hope that this overview has given you some sense of the diversity, depth and impact of the work we publish.

A huge thanks from me to our wonderful ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog co-editors Alison Fox,ÌýBarbara Skinner,ÌýNaomi Flynn,ÌýKathryn Spicksley,ÌýElizabeth RushtonÌý²¹²Ô»åÌýJennifer Agbaire (not least for continuing to put up with me!). Massive thanks too to ½¿É«µ¼º½â€™s Acting Publications Manager Claire Castle,Ìýwho has stepped in so magnificently these past twelve months; to ½¿É«µ¼º½â€™s CEO Nick Johnson (for dreaming up the ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog in the first place), and to everyone in the ½¿É«µ¼º½ office for their work supporting the BB, including Paru Rai for her tireless behind-the-BB-scenery work and for creating the ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog , which has been so instrumental in increasing the optics that this blog has generated since the newsletter’s inception.

But, most of all, we would like to thank all our authors – your creativity, inspiration and patience lie behind the success story that the ½¿É«µ¼º½ Blog has become. We wish all our readers and authors a safe, joyous and relaxing festive season, and let us hope that 2026 – indeed, the next decade – brings happier and exciting times to one and all.