The Department of Educational Research was delighted with its performance in REF 2021, which assessed the quality of research in universities from 2014-2020. Overall, 55% of the Department’s research was rated as ‘world leading’ and 90% as ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’. These impressive results place the Department in the top 10 of 83 submissions in Education on overall GPA and joint first for Impact.

The outcomes from REF2021 show how the Department’s research in Education and Social Justice, Higher Education, and Technology-Enhanced Learning is internationally leading. The Department’s performance in relation to the wider impact of its research impact was exceptional with 100% of its research impact rated as ‘outstanding’.

Head of Department, Professor Paul Ashwin, said “It is wonderful that the quality and impact of the Department’s research has been recognised in this way. This is down to the hard work of everyone in the Department. I am particularly proud that our impact case studies included evidence of how graduates of the Department’s PhD doctoral programmes have used the Department’s research to make changes to educational policies and practices around the world. This highlights how the Department acts as a vibrant community which is committed to producing high quality research that can be used to address urgent social and educational challenges”.

The Department’s success in relation to research impact was based on two impact case studies. The first case study focused on ‘Enhancing gender equality in national and international educational contexts’. It showed how research in the Department had significantly enhanced gender equality within educational contexts by shaping and influencing:

• government thinking and strategies nationally and internationally;
• behaviours, attitudes and practices relating to teacher workforce planning, teaching practices, and sexual violence training;
• understandings of gender among teachers, students and the general public.

The second case study on ‘Evaluating and enhancing the quality of learning and teaching in higher education’ showed how the Department’s research significantly enhanced the quality of teaching and learning in higher education (HE) nationally and internationally by:

• shaping national policies aimed at evaluating and enhancing learning and teaching internationally;
• informing the development of institutional and practitioner approaches to the enhancement and evaluation of learning and teaching internationally.