News and Blog

As someone who has a chronic illness and is immune supressed, I was shielding for long periods during the pandemic. In this prolonged isolation, I felt affinity with some older and disabled people, who historically have been theorised and identified separately. I argue that the COVID-19 pandemic brought together these two groups through some similar…

A new paper in Electoral Studies by Ralph Scott at the University of Bristol and Melanie Jones at Cardiff University investigates the influence of disability on party political preferences. While there is an emerging evidence base on the effect of disability on voter turnout (including a recent paper authored by Melanie and Samuel Brown), the…

The latest book in WISERD’s Civil Society and Social Change series with Policy Press has been published today, entitled Commons, Citizenship and Power: Reclaiming the Margins. Since the 2010s, populism and illiberal politics have been on the rise. Demagogue leaders preach simplified rhetoric to vilify the powerless, polarising city and rural areas and sparking such…

Rob French leads the ADR Wales Education research theme. In this blog post, Rob describes how the intersection of education and child health data will be explored in a new special edition of the International Journal of Population Data Science. Linking child health and education data enables us to explore the mutual dependence of these two critical…

Jen Keating is a Research Associate from the ADR Wales Education theme and the WISERD Education Data Lab. In a new blog post, she describes two workshops she led in November for parents, carers, and educators on how they can best use national data to support children with additional learning needs (ALN) in Wales. These workshops took place at…

A Special Edition of the Mug of Research short films has been released on ‘How to achieve impact and ensure policy change’. In celebration of its publication, the full Mug of Research series has been re-released with updated edits. They are available here on the Aberystwyth University YouTube channel. Mug of Research is a video…

Sarah Murphy MS, the Welsh Government Minister for Mental Health and Wellbeing recently visited sbarc|spark to gather the latest research insights. WISERD researchers presented findings on how parents of neurodivergent children experience the school exclusion process and how we can use administrative data to improve education outcomes for children with additional learning needs. Excluded Lives…

Despite being sizeable in many countries, the disability pay gap (DPG) has attracted limited academic and policy attention internationally, especially in comparison to other protected characteristics, such as gender. The recent draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill announced in the 2024 King’s Speech suggests a major change in the UK in this regard, with the…

Congratulations to WISERD co-director, Dr Anwen Elias, based at Aberystwyth University, who has been appointed by the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Climate Change and Rural Affairs, Huw Irranca-Davies, as chair of a new Innovating Democracy Advisory Group. The Innovating Democracy Advisory Group has been created following a recommendation in the Independent Commission…

British farmers are protesting against proposals in the recent budget to change inheritance tax relief on farms. They claim the change will force many farm families to sell land in order to pay tax bills. While that is debatable, this is only the latest grievance for farmers who have had to face rising costs, volatile…