Raising Attainment in Education: the Role of Psychology

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Stephen Gorard BSc (psychology with statistics), PGCE (mathematics with IT), MA (education management), DipRes (social science), PhD (education policy) is Professor of Education Research at the University of Birmingham, concerned with equity and effectiveness in education across the lifecourse, and with improving the quality of education research.

Recent publications include:

Smith, E. and Gorard, S. (2012) "Teachers are kind to those who have good marks": a study of Japanese young peoples' views of fairness and equity in schools, Compare, 42, 1 Gorard, S. (2012) Who is eligible for free school meals?: Characterising FSM as a measure of disadvantage in England, British Educational Research Journal, iFirst, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01411926.2011.608118
Khan, M. and Gorard, S. (2012) A randomised controlled trial of the use of a piece of commercial software for the acquisition of reading skills, Educational Review, 64, 1, 21-36 Gorard, S. and See, BH (2011) How can we enhance enjoyment of secondary school?: the student view, British Educational Research Journal, 37, 4, 671-690 Gorard, S. and Smith, E. (2010) Equity in Education: an international comparison of pupil perspectives, London: Palgrave

Stephen Gorard BSc (psychology with statistics), PGCE (mathematics with IT), MA (education management), DipRes (social science), PhD (education policy) is Professor of Education Research at the University of Birmingham, concerned with equity and effectiveness in education across the lifecourse, and with improving the quality of education research. Recent publications include:

Smith, E. and Gorard, S. (2012) "Teachers are kind to those who have good marks": a study of Japanese young peoples' views of fairness and equity in schools, Compare, 42, 1 Gorard, S. (2012) Who is eligible for free school meals?: Characterising FSM as a measure of disadvantage in England, British Educational Research Journal, iFirst, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01411926.2011.608118

Khan, M. and Gorard, S. (2012) A randomised controlled trial of the use of a piece of commercial software for the acquisition of reading skills, Educational Review, 64, 1, 21-36 Gorard, S. and See, BH (2011) How can we enhance enjoyment of secondary school?: the student view, British Educational Research Journal, 37, 4, 671-690 Gorard, S. and Smith, E. (2010) Equity in Education: an international comparison of pupil perspectives, London: Palgrave

Professor Guy Claxton
Centre for Real-World Learning, School of Education, Winchester University

After appointments at Oxford, the Institute of Education, King's College London and Bristol, Guy Claxton is currently Co-Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning, and Professor of the Learning Sciences, at the University of Winchester. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Royal Society of Arts, and an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences. Guy holds degrees from Cambridge and Oxford in experimental psychology.

His contributions to psychology fall into three main areas: the learnability of practical intelligence, especially in educational contexts; historical and contemporary approaches to the unconscious; and the development of East-West psychology, bringing together scientific and Buddhist approaches to mind and self. A prolific author, Guy's most important books on the unconscious include Hare Brain, Tortoise mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less and The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious. On East-West psychology, he has written Noises from the Darkroom and co-edited Beyond Therapy and The Psychology of Awakening. In education, Guy's books include Wise Up: The Challenge of Lifelong Learning (1999), Building Learning Power (2002), What's The Point of School? (2008) and (with Bill Lucas and others) New Kinds of Smart: How the Science of Learnable Intelligence Is Changing Education (2010) and The Learning Powered School (2011). His new book, Intelligence in the Flesh: Why Bodies Are Smarter than Thought, will be published in 2013.

Building Learning Power (BLP) has evolved over 15 years into a provenly effective approach to teacher habit development and school culture change with a very specific intention: that of systematically developing students' confidence, capacity and appetite for learning within education and beyond. The approach has been widely influential across the UK, for example in Milton Keynes, the Isle of Man and the London Boroughs of Ealing, Barnet and Newham, and in countries as far afield as Dubai, Chile, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.