Professor Bryony Hoskins has won three new prestigious funded research projects, which brings her research income over the last year to more than £1 million for the University of Roehampton.
The first of these new research projects is a highly esteemed UKRI/Horizon research project, 'Strategies for achieving equity and inclusion in education, training and learning in democratic Europe (STRIDE)'. This three-year project comprises of a multinational consortium of universities and civil society organisations in seven countries (Norway, Greece, Denmark, Belgium, Hungary, Poland and United Kingdom) and starts in February next year.
It is designed to develop a new, comprehensive, and comparative knowledge-base on effective education reforms, policy initiatives and interventions aimed at reducing inequalities in education, training and learning outcomes in Europe.
STRIDE will do this through the analyses of education reforms in national and regional systems, existing large-scale educational assessment data and existing longitudinal data on the causal link between educational and other social policies and inequalities in educational achievements. In examining the learning progress of students over time, STRIDE will closely examine a range of intersectional variables such as socio-economic background, gender, (dis)abilities, migration status, home language, early childhood education and care (ECEC) attendance, which may affect learning outcomes in different ways in different contexts. Professor Hoskins, the UK (PI), will lead the research on identifying the effects of policy reforms on education outcomes using longitudinal data.
The second new research project is a four-year Leverhulme grant together with UCL (Prof Germ Janmaat) to create an Education for Democracy index (EFDI) to establish how well, the policies and practices of a country's education system promote democratic values and competences. This project will begin in January 2024.
The third new research project is a sixth repeat funding from UNICEF to support the finalisation of the instruments to measure Life Skills and Citizenship Education in the Middle East (LSCE Measurement Instrument | UNICEF Middle East and North Africa). The focus this time is on developing instruments to measure Critical-Thinking, Cooperation, Resilience, and Communication skills for Grade 7 students with field trials being run by the IEA in Egypt, Tunisia, and the State of Palestine. This one-year project will begin in December.
These three new projects will run alongside her ongoing prestigious £3 million EU Horizon project Gender Empowerment through politics in classrooms (G-EPIC) currently running in Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom that began in February 2023.
G-EPIC research began by establishing the state of play through classroom observations and reanalysis of existing quantitative data to understand how inequalities in attitudes and dispositions towards political engagement are learnt. The project is currently in the process of undertaking experiments in schools and co-constructing with civil-society, teachers, and students an intervention to support disadvantaged girls.
These experiments and interventions will be rigorously evaluated in comparisons with control groups and will lead to the development of the Gender Empowerment in Classroom intervention that will be
disseminated and delivered in schools across Europe creating the possibility for real change and the reduction of gender inequalities in political leadership.
There is an online seminar series if you wish to get involved.