News and Blog

  On Monday, May 23rd, WISERD held a one day practitioner conference to disseminate key findings and recommendations in relation to the three year independent evaluation of the Foundation Phase early years curriculum. The conference brought together practitioners from the length and breadth of Wales, as well as key individuals from the Welsh Government Early…

  Wednesday 25th November saw the launch of ‘Making the Case for the Social Sciences: Wales’ at the Pierhead Building in Cardiff. “Making the Case for the Social Sciences: Wales” is the tenth in a series of publicationsproduced by the Academy of Social Sciences and its Campaign for Social Science in order to celebrate the real and important…

In early September, the WISERD Education research team joined many other academics in the annual before-term ritual: to leave the warm confines of the university and stretch their legs at another institution – sometimes in a faraway land, sometimes much closer to home. On 7thSeptember we began the journey to Budapest, capital of Hungary and the venue…

As part of the Representing Communities project I worked with a group of Year 10 pupils for four months. The aim of this part of the research was to engage with the young people through photography to explore their perceptions of community life. This included some discussion of their feelings towards media representations of their community, which…

Children in Wales are required to begin school at age 5. Although parents have no legal obligation to put their children into forms of education before this age, it is widely accepted that pre-school education has a positive impact on children’s cognitive and social development. Pre-school education is therefore universally popular and local authorities in…

Cardiff University coverage of WISERD Education’s report to HEFCW – Access to Higher Education in Wales can be found by following the link below. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/141953-catchment-22-school-and-local-authority-impact-university-chances

The impact of social media on young people’s lives is underlined starkly today as a new study by researchers at the Cardiff University-based Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research Data (WISERD) reports that more than one in five teenagers say they “almost always” wake up during the night to look at or post messages….

A recent review of the national curriculum for Wales has called for a radical reimagining of how curriculum is to be conceptualised, enacted and assessed (Welsh Government, 2015). Currently, citizenship education in Wales is philosophically framed by the Curriculum Cymreig, an initiative to develop a “Welsh ethos” in schools in Wales and delivered through the Personal…

How young people make choices about university, where and what to study has been a question asked by many social researchers, policy-makers and practitioners alike. Research has shown that when young people make choices about going to university, a range of factors come into play including peer influences, their families’ experience of university and their…