Our research includes primary research and secondary analyses, as well as designing and evaluating interventions within schools and colleges.

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Current areas of research focus

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Selecting the right intervention for the local setting

We have developed and are refining a protocol to help educational practitioners understand which psychological barriers are holding back which groups of students in their school or college. This helps practitioners to select and/or tailor an intervention that will be effective locally. Find out more.

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Home Learning Study - Education in the Time of Corona

We are creating a series of short research reports containing the key findings from our Education in the Time of Corona study on home learning in UK schools. The study is based on a survey of over 3,500 teachers and parents and focuses on inequalities in the effectiveness of provision for different groups of pupils. Find out more.

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Understanding and overcoming bias in education. We are running a series of studies to examine how and when bias in academic judgements may negatively contribute to the outcomes of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This line of research also focuses on methods of overcoming these issues. Our latest published work on this topic can be found here. 

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Other interventions and Evaluations

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Realising Opportunities 

Realising Opportunities is a charity that promotes fair access and social mobility of students from groups underrepresented in higher education.  We worked with them to create a bespoke psychological intervention that aimed to increase retention on their program.  The work is ongoing.

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Homewood school and sixth form

Homewood school and sixth form are strongly committed research.  We worked collaboratively (with Dr Claire Tyson) to design a bespoke intervention that aims to raise the attainment of under-performing pupils.  The work is ongoing.

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Widening Participation

The University of Sussex's Widening Participation team runs the Sussex Study Experience programme that brings would-be first-generation students to the Sussex campus to introduce them to university study.  We evaluated the programme and reported the results to the team.  

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Education Endowment Foundation

The Education Endowment Foundation funded us to implement a self-affirmation intervention across 29 schools in England, aiming to raise the attainment of pupils eligible for free school meals.  The reports are available here.

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Finding Rhythms 

Finding Rhythms is a charity that runs music workshops for prisoners.  We evaluated the programme. You can read the published paper, here.

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Talks and Workshops

 

Realising Opportunities

We gave a day workshop on how to effectively communicate with underrepresented students in education.

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Widening Participation

We have given several presentations and been involved in workshops on the psychological factors affecting disadvantaged students in education.

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Behavioural Insights Team

We presented our work on self-affirmation interventions in schools.

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Westminster Symposium

We presented our work on psychological processes underlying socioeconomic attainment gaps in English schools.