primary school – BIPE Project

Workshop for school staff in-service day at Edinburgh primary school

Posted on 23rd January 202423rd January 2024 by lucy.haslam

A photo of Katherin Barg and Valentina Perinetti Casoni outside of Gracemount Primary School

On 8th January, Katherin and Valentina gave a workshop titled Inequalities and bias in schools: reasons, research and reactions at Gracemount Primary School in Edinburgh. The event was organised as part of the school January in-service day and involved more than 50 members of staff including teachers, nursery staff, Pupil Support Assistants, and office staff.

The workshop started with an overview of ‘traditional’ and recent academic research on socioeconomic and ethnic inequalities in education, focusing particularly on the role of teacher-student relationships and on recent evidence on achievement gaps in Scotland and England.

Gracemount school staff was then guided through two main interactive, reflective, and creative group activities. The first activity focused on encouraging workshop participants to critically discuss BIPE preliminary findings on teacher bias. Then to share their own experiences and views on potential mechanisms and explanations for misunderstandings and misperceptions between teachers and school staff on one side and pupils and their families on their other. The second activity gave the staff the opportunity to reflect on their own school and classroom practices and experiences in order to develop practical strategies to tackle bias and inequalities in the context of Gracemount school itself.

Initial feedback from participants was very positive, demonstrating a great deal of interest in the topic addressed by the workshop and its interactive activities. Participants said that, as a result, they felt encouraged to challenge themselves as teachers and education practitioners.

For example, one participant reported how the workshop might motivate themselves and other teachers to:

[…] become more aware of their biases[,] keep themselves accountable for how the children are perceived, [l]ook at our own behaviour and how it impacts our teaching[, and b]e honest with ourselves.

If you are interested in hearing more about our teacher workshops, further information can be found on our flyer.

Slides from the workshop can be found on our ‘Teaching materials’ page.

Valentina presents at the 2023 Society for Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies Annual Conference

Posted on 17th October 202317th October 2023 by lucy.haslam

Visual identity for the BSA 2023 conference

On 9th October, Valentina presented at the 2023 Society for Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies (SLLS) Annual Conference – Life Courses in Times of Uncertainty held in Munich, Germany.

At the 2023 SLLS Conference, Valentina presented preliminary results for a work-in-progress BIPE paper investigating ethnic biases in English state primary schools. The paper explores to what extent teacher perceptions of students’ school effort are in agreement with students’ own reported school effort. First, it considers whether any discrepancies between the two are systematically linked to the student ethnic background, then it investigates the impact of the school ethnic composition on these patterns of ethnic teacher biases.

Preliminary empirical evidence shows that teacher perceptions of students’ school effort are not entirely in agreement with students’ own reports: indeed, they appear to be biased based on the ethnic background of the student in question. We also find evidence that the more contact a teacher has with students of a certain ethnicity, the less their perception of students of that specific ethnicity will be negatively biased.

Slides from the presentation can be viewed on our ‘Materials and publications’ page.

Katherin presents at the University of Bamberg

Posted on 13th March 202313th March 2023 by lucy.haslam

Katherin presented initial results of the project at the Oberseminar of the Chair for Sociology (Social Stratification) of Professor Cornelia Kristen at the University of Bamberg. The title of the presentation was ‘Social and ethnic biases in primary school: Preliminary results from a study of teacher perceptions of students’ academic attitudes’.

The abstract for the presentation was as follows:

This study aims to investigate socioeconomic and ethnic biases in teachers’ perceptions of students’ attitudes to school. Here, we define a social or ethnic bias in teacher perceptions of the student’s attitudes as discrepancy between a teacher report of a student’s attitude (e.g., how much student finds school interesting, enjoys school, etc.) and the student’s own report that is systematically linked to the student’s socioeconomic status or ethnic background.

This talk presents results from a study using large-scale secondary data for England – the British Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). In a first step, a residual method was applied to estimate the discrepancies between teacher and student perceptions, and in a second step, the residuals were regressed on student socioeconomic and ethnic background, as well as a number of confounding and mediating variables. Preliminary results show important socioeconomic and ethnic biases in the teacher perceptions.

The study will be extended by corresponding analyses for Scotland (Growing Up in Scotland) and Germany (National Education Panel Study). The multi-country approach will enable us to explore how “macro-level factors” such as education policy and teacher training influence teacher bias. In this talk, theoretical assumptions on the possible impacts of such “macro-level factors” will be discussed.

First Federation Trust workshop

Posted on 13th March 202313th March 2023 by lucy.haslam

On 25th January, Katherin and the BIPE team gave a workshop on biases in primary education to school leaders and teachers from the First Federation Trust.

The First Federation Trust is a multi-academy trust and education charity linking 19 primary schools located across Devon and into Dorset. The aim of the trust is to enhance the provision of the schools, whilst enabling them to maintain their individual identities and the freedom to shape and deliver a curriculum that reflects their school’s values and the aspirations of the children they serve.

Participant feedback was very positive highlighting the importance and impact of such activities. Participants said, for example, that the seminar motivates teachers to:

Extend our curriculum further, to include opportunities to challenge bias thoughts, to support both children and staff on views and openly discuss their views.

If you are interested in hearing more about our teacher workshops, further information can be found on our flyer, on our ‘Teaching materials’ page.

Katherin presents at the Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education (CIRE) of the University of Bristol

Posted on 13th March 202313th March 2023 by lucy.haslam

On the 6th of December, Katherin presented at an internal CIRE meeting, a forum intended for faculty and PGRs to share research ideas and ongoing projects in order to receive feedback from faculty and PGRs with different research interest and areas of expertise in the field of educational research.

Katherin presented some preliminary results of the BIPE project focusing on social and ethnic biases in primary school in England.

Slides from the presentation can be viewed on our ‘Materials and publications’ page.

Valentina presents at the 2022 International Conference of the Society for Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies

Posted on 31st October 202212th July 2023 by lucy.haslam

On 24th October, Valentina presented a published study on biased teacher assessment at the 2022 11th Annual International Conference of the Society for Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies (SLLS) – Growing Up and Growing Older Across Societies: Harnessing the Power of Comparative Research.

The study, titled “Teacher judgements, student social background, and student progress in primary school: a cross-country perspective,” was conducted as part of the Open Research Area-funded project DICE (Development of Inequalities in Child Educational Achievement: A Six Country Study) on which Valentina worked on between September 2020 and June 2021. At the 2022 SLLS Conference, Valentina presented the paper as part of a symposium dedicated to the DICE project alongside three other papers – presented by three other project members – investigating different aspects of educational inequalities.

Slides from the presentation can be viewed on our ‘Materials and publications’ page.