News and Blog

New research by WISERD Co-Director, Professor Paul Chaney and Dr Sarbeswar Sahoo (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi) analyses civil society organisations’ (CSOs’) perspectives on religious freedom violations in Bangladesh. These have been recently thrown into stark relief following the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 2011 that confirmed Islam as the State religion of the…

Wales is in the process of undertaking a major overhaul of its national curriculum. Until recently, the curriculum largely resembled that put in place by the 1988 Education Reform Act. The new Curriculum for Wales, based on the Successful futures for all review by Graham Donaldson (2015), entails a radical move away from the traditional…

WISERD Director, Professor Sally Power, has won the Learned Society of Wales’ Hugh Owen Medal 2020 for her outstanding educational research. Professor Power is a leading education researcher, with a broad focus on policy and inequality. She plays a significant role in supporting education research throughout Wales. The WISERD Education Multi-Cohort Study (WMCS), directed by…

GCSE exams were due to take place over the next few weeks in Wales, but have been cancelled due to COVID-19. In the second of our blogs about the impact of the pandemic on young people’s education I look at the replacement of formal examinations with teacher assessments. As qualifications bodies will be relying more…

Empty supermarket shelves have been a scary symptom of the COVID-19 crisis. From daily staples to sneaky snacks, we’re running low. Those shelves reveal something we don’t normally need to think about: here in Wales, our dinners depend on imported food, supply chains, and distribution networks. Could panic at the shops have been averted if…

Those of us in WISERD engaged in education research have real worries about the impact of the Coronavirus on the welfare and progress of children and young people. Some are rightly concerned about the impact on young people’s physical and mental health. But here we want to concentrate on the potential effect of the response…

  Catherine Calderwood, forced to resign as Scotland’s chief medical officer, is far from the only city dweller to have caused controversy by flouting lockdown rules to visit her second home in the countryside. Resentment over “coronavirus holidays” is rising. The Covid-19 crisis has prompted some to seek to escape the city. Green spaces are…

Our understanding of how COVID-19 is moving through populations is still developing and the lack of reliable data means we are largely limited to case fatality estimates and we can only best guess the infection fatality rate. However, it is clear that the risk of hospitalisation and death from COVID19 has a sharp age gradient….

The team of researchers leading WISERD’s foundational economy work has contributed to a COVID-19 report, which makes a case for renewal of the foundational economy, after the immediate public health crisis is over. The crisis demonstrates the importance of the foundational economy, that part of the economy which produces essential goods and services consumed by…

This week, hundreds of thousands of volunteers reported for duty and have started helping the NHS in its fight against coronavirus. The public’s response in volunteering to assist the NHS has been one of the most positive reactions to the current coronavirus crisis. In particular, over 250,000 people living in England signed up to volunteer to provide help for…