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Furthering understanding about how education policy and practice can serve to mitigate the effects of intersecting inequalities and to improve social justice within and beyond the sector.
Theme leader: Dr Caine Rolleston
Education, more than almost any other public investment, is understood to have the potential to reduce poverty, promote growth and prosperity and to reduce inequalities. However, it is by no means guaranteed that education policies will deliver such benefits. Moreover, education policies can also reinforce inequality.
Intersecting inequalities are pervasive across all phases of education and transitions between them (early years, primary, secondary and tertiary). They are linked to poverty and a range of other markers of disadvantage and discrimination.
How do the various forms, institutions, organisations, structures and delivery mechanisms of education contribute to contemporary inequalities? How do political, economic, social and cultural aspects of historically framed contexts shape education inequalities? What is the role of education in reproducing and transforming these relationships?
We draw on a wide range of methods, working across disciplines to examine the evidence, policy and practice dimensions of these issues.
Research projects
- Fair AIEd - participatory design approaches to creating ethical AI for international education and development (UKRI funded). Selena Nemorin (Investigator)
- Young Lives - an international study of childhood poverty following the lives of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, India (in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), Peru and Vietnam over 15 years with Oxford University (funded by DFID and others). Caine Rolleston (Lead Education Researcher)
- Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) (funded by DFID and DFAT), with the University of Cambridge and Addis Ababa University in the Ethiopia Country Research Team. Caine Rolleston and Moses Oketch (Investigators)
- Higher Education, Inequality and the Public Good in four African countries: South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana (ESRC funded). Moses Oketch, Tristan Mccowan and Elaine Unterhalter (Investigators)
- Pedagogies for Critical Thinking: Innovation and Outcomes in African Higher Education (DFID/ESRC). Dr Tristan McCowan (Principal Investigator), Dr Rebecca Schendel (Principal Investigator), Dr Caine Rolleston (Researcher) and William Nicholas (Researcher)
- The effects of school-based decision-making on educational outcomes in low- and middle-income contexts: A systematic Review (DFID funded). Roy Carr-Hill, Caine Rolleston, Rebecca Schendel and Tejendra Pherali (Investigators)
- Better learning outcomes in Sierra Leone: Evaluating DFID's Improving Schools programme with Oxford Policy Management (DFID funded). Caine Rolleston (Investigator)