News and Blog

On the 30 June and 1 July, the 15th WISERD Annual Conference took place at Aberystwyth University, welcoming over 130 delegates. The agenda comprised 14 paper sessions, two panels, and three symposia and workshops under the theme of ‘Participation and partnership in a time of precarity and polarisation’. For the first time, this year’s agenda…

Research explores how communities can work together to bring about positive change. Academics will investigate how citizens, civil society organisations and policymakers are collaborating to tackle some of society’s most pressing problems. WISERD has secured £1.6m of funding from the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the three-year research programme, ‘People, Places, and…

On 13 May 2025, Dr Sophie Bartlett, an ADR Wales research associate based at WISERD, at Cardiff University, presented education research at ‘Science and the Senedd’, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 20th annual event held at the Senedd and the Pierhead in Cardiff Bay. The event was sponsored by the Deputy Presiding Officer of the…

A child’s characteristics and family background provide important indicators of whether they are more likely to have special educational needs (SEN), a Cardiff University study concludes. Academics analysed data from 284,010 pupils attending schools in Wales. Males, pupils of White ethnicity, pupils who were persistently absent, those from households with a lower socio-economic background all…

On 4th March, WISERD researchers Jemma Bridgeman and Chris Taylor led a webinar for practitioners on the Excluded Lives project, for Cardiff Council. The Excluded Lives project examined school exclusion across the UK and uncovered informal practices, systemic challenges, and school staff trying to support pupils with complex needs. The data showed a picture of…

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…

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…

At the recent WISERD Annual Conference, I gave a seminar with partners from civil society on school exclusion in Wales. The seminar explored the role of civil society in school exclusion and how families experience it. Below, I have included a summary of each presentation and a key takeaway for improving policy or practice. Excluded…

The 7th Foundational Economy Conference, entitled ‘Making things work: social innovation for liveability’ was held at sbarcIspark on the 10th and 11th of September 2024. It brought together researchers and practitioners in themed sessions that explored foundational issues and interventions from Wales, the rest of the UK and all across Europe. Our challenge is making…