In many ways Higher Education is in turmoil and facing some unprecedented challenges.  Without time to recover from the long-lasting and wide-reaching effects and legacies of the 2019 Pandemic and Brexit, negative political narratives and the move to regulation by the Office for Students call the identity of higher education into question.  We all feel the purpose, meaning and values of higher education shifting as increasing numbers of institutions, departments and subject areas fight for survival.  Whilst the higher education landscape may look and often feel very bleak, the point of departure for this paper is that education, by definition, requires a fundamental belief in itself as a force for good and a potential lever for change for the better. Higher education has a duty to educate and prepare its students and graduates for the world as it is in ways that empower them to make positive differences in and for their own work, societies and communities. Education is understood here in its broader sense, that is, as an ongoing human endeavour – an endeavour grounded in the realities of the everyday in ways which offer the possibility for educational responses to whatever challenges higher education continues to face.  It is argued here that subjects like Education Studies do, and must continue to, provide spaces for such understandings of higher education to be nurtured, developed and redeveloped in ways that are relevant to and for our changing, complex and uncertain presents and futures.  As higher education struggles to find its way and to redefine itself, this paper explores some of the invaluable contributions that subjects like Education Studies have to make.     

Gary’s keynote will consider the role, or not, of technology in education. It will reflect the conference theme, and consider if technologies can stimulate radical change and/or innovation in teaching and learning, or are just a ‘passing fad’.

While not in fact new, the practice and study of education futures has recently gained substantial attention from scholars, often in response to the pandemic or to climate change, as well as other unfolding social and planetary crises. Rather than aim for prediction, this type of research explores possible trajectories for education, often with respect to forces which many anticipate will have significant impact (e.g., emerging technologies, climate change, and increasing social inequality). While not all of this work is directly concerned with liberatory education, much of it aims for critical engagement with unjust systems shaping education today. In conversation with this research, this presentation explores the role of imagination in creating liberatory education futures. I suggest that to pursue such futures requires nurturing a radical, decolonial imagination, one that profoundly contends with the constraints and harms of the colonial modern condition, a condition which dominant educational systems are commonly complicit in reinforcing. The  goal of this presentation is to highlight the colonial modern condition in education, especially as it constrains how many imagine education’s futures, and to propose strategies for developing the decolonial imagination for the work of imagining otherwise.

‘Are we included? is a cross-sector, multi-stakeholder project running in Plymouth and moving into its third year, 2024/25. It brings together leads from the DfE, MATs, Plymouth city council, city secondary schools, two city universities, teachers, TAs, pupils and HE students working collectively and with one agreed vision of inclusion, to achieve progress for our city pupils and community. This paper will take you on its three-year journey, highlighting how a communities of practice and place-based education initiative resulted in radical change and evidenced impact for inclusion.

Chantelle will set out ‘big’ stories from Wales as a ‘small’ country in the formation and ongoing endeavours of a growing anti-racist leadership movement called DARPL (Diversity Anti-racist practice and professional learning), constructing a growing pan-Wales movement of ‘DARPLers’. ‘DARPLing’ is funded by the Welsh Government and housed within Cardiff Metropolitan University. Open reflection upon Wales as a historical and contemporary place for global communities examines the traditions of Welsh race-consciousness that, in 2023, led to Wales becoming the first nation in the UK to make the teaching of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic history mandatory within the curriculum. But how do we do that? This is not easy! It is work of the heart – ‘Gwaith Calon’. What are we doing in our legacy-building to help leaders in education unlearn and relearn, to be equipped to realise this expectation? DARPL is contributing to the changing Welsh educational landscape through anti-racist professional learning, academic research, and the establishment of communities of practice. We direct attention to the field of education as a space in which Black British intellectual positions are, and have historically been, articulated. Chantelle will draw on her experiences in family and community life and work starting from the role of Cardiff in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as one of the most important docks in the world, resulting in a backdrop of racial fluidity in the nation, moving through to the historical point at which the offspring of Britain’s ‘new commonwealth’ populations entered the school system in the 1950s, with childhood in Tiger Bay in 1970s and up until the contemporary development of a suite of Welsh government policies. These include 2022’s Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan (for Anti-Racist Wales, 2030) aimed at achieving ‘an anti-racist Wales by 2030’. Our re-telling of this story focuses on global majority people in Wales, not as objects of social policy, but as subjects who have helped craft the diverse and complementary anti-racist legacies that continue within the work of DARPL. Chantelle will talk about DARPL as a Community of Practice, drawing together the interacting themes of Welsh identity, cynefin (overly simplified in translation as belonging), hiraeth (love of home/country) and Black British/Welsh scholarship in exploring DARPL as a contemporary movement that is helping to define and differentiate a model of anti-racism rooted in the historically specific dialogues of the Welsh context.