Volume 7 of the Education in Practice journal has just been published (ACCESS HERE). This volume includes papers published during the 2025-26 academic year on a ‘rolling’ basis on our website and reflect a wide range of scholarship carried out at the University of Birmingham, ranging from individual case studies of local practice to investigations of systems and wider practice. As is the purpose of our journal, our contributors are often at the start of their scholarly journeys, and some of their work has been developed as part of CPD programmes offered at our institution.
In the collection of papers for this issue, there is a strong emphasis on inclusive practice, with pieces focusing on neurodiversity, awarding gaps, emotions of learning, disability inclusion, and mental health. This perhaps demonstrates that a strong attention to the human dimensions of education has become an even more pressing priority in the age of artificial intelligence.
Although AI is not going to disappear from our lives any time soon, there seems to be an urgency in its use within sustainable and ethical frameworks, and in a way which accentuates human capabilities, especially that of critical thinking, the topic of a paper included in this volume.
Three further papers in this volume were developed out of a ‘capstone’ PGCHE assignment, and focus on the topics of neurodivergence (Qamar Natsheh and Rickson C. Mesquita), Disability (Katharine Wheetman), and the awarding gap (Dean PJ Kavanagh). We are also pleased to include Piyali Bhattacharya’s paper on supporting diverse PG learners as this piece sprang out of a fellowship application on our Beacon Scheme. This demonstrates a culmination of the principles driving the Educational Development Team and our portfolio of support for scholarship through our CPD programmes, our Education Research and Scholarship Network, and EPF project funding – namely that it seeks to embed evidence-based practice and scholarly approaches into all aspects of its work, and connect the dots between such CPD programmes and scholarship is the natural outcome of this principle.
Marios Hadjianastasis and Alison Davies
October 2026
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