BERA UK Podcast

BERA UK

The British Educational Research Association (BERA) is the leading authority on educational research in the UK, supporting and representing the community of scholars, practitioners and everyone engaged in and with educational research both nationally and internationally.BERA is a membership association and learned society committed to advancing research quality, building research capacity and fostering research engagement. We aim to inform the development of policy and practice by promoting the best quality evidence produced by educational research.This podcast consists of research informed content on key educational issues. This podcast gives our members a voice to promote their research and features educational leaders and experts speaking about hot topic issues in Education. Our aim is to produce and promote episodes that attract policymakers, parents, teachers, educational leaders, members of school communities, politicians, and anyone who is interested in education today.

  1. 1d ago

    Rethinking ADHD: Episode 6: Masking in Women and Girls with ADHD

    Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience is a podcast mini-series produced for the British Education Research Association (BERA), bringing together researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore what ADHD and neurodiversity really mean in educational settings, and what it would take to do better. Across five episodes, the series moves from the theoretical foundations of Critical ADHD Studies through questions of epistemic injustice, school culture, co-occurring conditions and the social world of neurodivergent young people, drawing on recent scholarship and the expertise of guests who have spent careers and lifetimes thinking about these questions. Dr Ana-Maria Butura Santos’'s research centres on masking in women and girls with ADHD, culminating in the development of the MASQ (Masking in ADHD Scale Questionnaire), the first ADHD-specific masking scale. Her dissertation work identified four distinct subtypes of masking behaviour (suppressing, adapting, hiding and compensating), documented a significant misalignment between DSM diagnostic criteria and the internal experience of ADHD as women describe it, and demonstrated that teacher ratings systematically fail to capture what girls' own self-reports reveal, to the point where no girls in her study sample met teacher screening criteria for probable ADHD. Her current work on the ART-transition co-design project extends these findings into practice, centering lived experience in the design of ADHD support. The episode brings the series' 'unknowing' and epistemic threads directly to bear on the question of gender and diagnosis: whose version of ADHD has been centred in research and clinical practice, what the cost of that has been for girls and women, and what becomes possible when internal experience is taken as seriously as observable behaviour. Find out more

    50 min

  2. 1d ago

    Rethinking ADHD: Episode 5: Reframing Neurodiversity: Research, Friendship and the Social World of ADHD

    Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience is a podcast mini-series produced for the British Education Research Association (BERA), bringing together researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore what ADHD and neurodiversity really mean in educational settings, and what it would take to do better. Across five episodes, the series moves from the theoretical foundations of Critical ADHD Studies through questions of epistemic injustice, school culture, co-occurring conditions and the social world of neurodivergent young people, drawing on recent scholarship and the expertise of guests who have spent careers and lifetimes thinking about these questions. Dr Anastasia Kalokyri's Pastoral Care in Education paper (2025) provides the research anchor: a nine-month ethnographic study in a Scottish secondary school, drawn from her doctoral research completed at the University of Edinburgh in 2024. Her findings (ADHD as fluid identity; students demonstrating sophisticated social agency; exclusion stemming from ableist and gendered peer norms rather than individual deficit) challenge the prevailing deficit framing directly and in students' own voices. Anastasia's research interests centre on ADHD, intersectionality, school inclusion and ethnography, and she brings both scholarly depth and extensive teaching experience across multiple countries. Jill Dykes brings a distinctive combination of perspectives as founder and CEO of ADHD Scotland (a newly formed social enterprise and charity), with an earlier career spanning social enterprise, mental health, social work and counselling, and business development in academia. She is also a parent with ADHD to two AuDHD children, meaning her advocacy is grounded in both professional commitment and lived family experience. Jack Cooper holds both an analytical position as an undergraduate researcher and a lived experience position as someone with ADHD who founded ADHD United. Questions are differentiated by expertise across the three guests, while building cumulatively toward the episode's closing question about what reframing genuinely requires educators to unlearn. Find out more

    1h 10m

  3. 1d ago

    Rethinking ADHD:Episode 4: AuDHD: Living at the Intersection of Autism and ADHD

    Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience is a podcast mini-series produced for the British Education Research Association (BERA), bringing together researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore what ADHD and neurodiversity really mean in educational settings, and what it would take to do better. Across five episodes, the series moves from the theoretical foundations of Critical ADHD Studies through questions of epistemic injustice, school culture, co-occurring conditions and the social world of neurodivergent young people, drawing on recent scholarship and the expertise of guests who have spent careers and lifetimes thinking about these questions. Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist returns as sole guest for this episode, which deepens the 'unknowing' thread established in Episode 1. Now Professor of Social Work at Karlstad University, her research career began in gender and sexuality studies before transitioning into disability research in 2008, where she has remained working at the intersection of neurodiversity studies, social work and the lived experience of autism and ADHD. She is AuDHD herself. Her collective autoethnographic work with neurodivergent scholars (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al. 2023a, 2023b, 2023c) provides the primary source material, alongside the CADS chapter and emerging AuDHD scholarship, particularly Craddock (2024, 2026) on AuDHD as a residual diagnostic category that falls outside and between existing definitions of autism and ADHD. The episode addresses the generational dimension directly: the pre-2013 diagnostic exclusion of co-occurring autism and ADHD left a generation without the full picture of themselves. Questions move from the historical to the experiential to the practical, asking what AuDHD-affirming practice would actually look like in educational settings. Find out more

    46 min

  4. 1d ago

    Rethinking ADHD: Episode 3 (Part 2): More Than Inclusion: Reimagining Secondary Schools Through Neurodiversity-Affirming Practice

    Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience is a podcast mini-series produced for the British Education Research Association (BERA), bringing together researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore what ADHD and neurodiversity really mean in educational settings, and what it would take to do better. Across five episodes, the series moves from the theoretical foundations of Critical ADHD Studies through questions of epistemic injustice, school culture, co-occurring conditions and the social world of neurodivergent young people, drawing on recent scholarship and the expertise of guests who have spent careers and lifetimes thinking about these questions. This episode is anchored in the Lang et al. LRE paper (2026), which reports Phase 1 of the Neurodiversity in Scottish Schools (NISS) project, a co-produced, participatory enquiry with neurodivergent young people, parents, educators, researchers and policymakers. The six themes of the paper (inclusion as cultural project; credibility and being believed; teacher moral distress; structural constraints; relational belonging; sustainability) provide the structural backbone for the conversation. Frances Akinde and Joe Arday join as additional guests. Akinde (a former headteacher and qualified SENCo, now working as a SEND inspector and advisor and running her consultancy InclusionHT) brings practitioner expertise in neurodiversity-affirming education grounded in both professional knowledge and her own lived experience as a neurodivergent educator. She writes and speaks specifically about the intersectionality of race and SEND. Arday (a computer science teacher with 15 years in the field, an elected BCS council member, Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts) brings a practitioner perspective on diversity and inclusion in education and technology. Jason Lang, as lead researcher on NISS, brings both the research findings and his own lived experience as an autistic clinician and father of neurodivergent daughters. Find out more

    53 min

  5. 1d ago

    Rethinking ADHD: Episode 3 (Part 1): More Than Inclusion: Reimagining Secondary Schools Through Neurodiversity-Affirming Practice

    Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience is a podcast mini-series produced for the British Education Research Association (BERA), bringing together researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore what ADHD and neurodiversity really mean in educational settings, and what it would take to do better. Across five episodes, the series moves from the theoretical foundations of Critical ADHD Studies through questions of epistemic injustice, school culture, co-occurring conditions and the social world of neurodivergent young people, drawing on recent scholarship and the expertise of guests who have spent careers and lifetimes thinking about these questions. This episode is anchored in the Lang et al. LRE paper (2026), which reports Phase 1 of the Neurodiversity in Scottish Schools (NISS) project, a co-produced, participatory enquiry with neurodivergent young people, parents, educators, researchers and policymakers. The six themes of the paper (inclusion as cultural project; credibility and being believed; teacher moral distress; structural constraints; relational belonging; sustainability) provide the structural backbone for the conversation. Frances Akinde and Joe Arday join as additional guests. Akinde (a former headteacher and qualified SENCo, now working as a SEND inspector and advisor and running her consultancy InclusionHT) brings practitioner expertise in neurodiversity-affirming education grounded in both professional knowledge and her own lived experience as a neurodivergent educator. She writes and speaks specifically about the intersectionality of race and SEND. Arday (a computer science teacher with 15 years in the field, an elected BCS council member, Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts) brings a practitioner perspective on diversity and inclusion in education and technology. Jason Lang, as lead researcher on NISS, brings both the research findings and his own lived experience as an autistic clinician and father of neurodivergent daughters. Find out more

    48 min

  6. 1d ago

    Rethinking ADHD: Episode 2: "Nothing about us without us": Experiencing Silencing and Epistemic Injustice

    Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience is a podcast mini-series produced for the British Education Research Association (BERA), bringing together researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore what ADHD and neurodiversity really mean in educational settings, and what it would take to do better. Across five episodes, the series moves from the theoretical foundations of Critical ADHD Studies through questions of epistemic injustice, school culture, co-occurring conditions and the social world of neurodivergent young people, drawing on recent scholarship and the expertise of guests who have spent careers and lifetimes thinking about these questions. Kadodia and Krueger's paper (published online April 2026) makes a philosophically significant intervention: Fricker's widely-used epistemic injustice framework implicitly presupposes neurotypical norms of communication and exchange. The paper reframes epistemic injustice as a distributed, structural phenomenon enacted through socio-material environments rather than primarily through individual prejudice. Their use of Medina's 'meta-lucidity' and niche construction theory provides conceptual tools for rebuilding epistemic environments in ways that genuinely include neurodivergent perspectives. Kadodia's PhD research on predictive processing and autism within a 4E cognition framework, and Krueger's broader work on phenomenology, social cognition and psychopathology, converge in this paper to bring both philosophical rigour and cognitive science to bear on the question of how neurodivergent people are heard (or not) in educational and institutional settings. Questions are anchored in the paper's own language and examples, and span from classroom to lecture theatre, making the episode relevant to practitioners across educational settings. Find out more

    58 min

  7. 1d ago

    Rethinking ADHD: Episode 1 (Part 1): Critical ADHD Studies: Unknowing and Re-storying

    Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience is a podcast mini-series produced for the British Education Research Association (BERA), bringing together researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore what ADHD and neurodiversity really mean in educational settings, and what it would take to do better. Across five episodes, the series moves from the theoretical foundations of Critical ADHD Studies through questions of epistemic injustice, school culture, co-occurring conditions and the social world of neurodivergent young people, drawing on recent scholarship and the expertise of guests who have spent careers and lifetimes thinking about these questions. This opening episode introduces the theoretical vocabulary that carries across the series. The CADS chapter by Brown, Bertilsdotter Rosqvist and Jackson-Perry (published in the Palgrave Handbook of Research Methods and Ethics in Neurodiversity Studies, 2024) maps the field from the pathology paradigm through the diagnosis-critical paradigm to the emerging CADS framework. Central to the episode are the concepts of 'unknowing' (developed in the volume by Jackson-Perry) and 're-storying', drawn from Yergeau's notion of resisting the 'medicalized storying of lack'. The companion Disability and Society piece (2025) extends this into a forward-facing call to action. Brown is now a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh's Usher Institute, where his work spans neuroethics, disability studies and science and technology studies, including affirmative perspectives on ADHD beyond neurodiversity frameworks. The episode addresses a mixed audience explicitly: researchers, practitioners, parents, students and those with lived experience. Questions build from the conceptual to the practical, closing by asking what the audience should stop being certain about. Find out more

    43 min

  8. Jun 22

    Rethinking ADHD: Episode 1 (Part 2): Critical ADHD Studies: Unknowing and Re-storying

    Rethinking ADHD: Voices from Research, Practice and Lived Experience is a podcast mini-series produced for the British Education Research Association (BERA), bringing together researchers, practitioners and people with lived experience to explore what ADHD and neurodiversity really mean in educational settings, and what it would take to do better. Across five episodes, the series moves from the theoretical foundations of Critical ADHD Studies through questions of epistemic injustice, school culture, co-occurring conditions and the social world of neurodivergent young people, drawing on recent scholarship and the expertise of guests who have spent careers and lifetimes thinking about these questions. The second part of our first episode introduces the theoretical vocabulary that carries across the series. The CADS chapter by Brown, Bertilsdotter Rosqvist and Jackson-Perry (published in the Palgrave Handbook of Research Methods and Ethics in Neurodiversity Studies, 2024) maps the field from the pathology paradigm through the diagnosis-critical paradigm to the emerging CADS framework. Central to the episode are the concepts of 'unknowing' (developed in the volume by Jackson-Perry) and 're-storying', drawn from Yergeau's notion of resisting the 'medicalized storying of lack'. The companion Disability and Society piece (2025) extends this into a forward-facing call to action. Brown is now a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh's Usher Institute, where his work spans neuroethics, disability studies and science and technology studies, including affirmative perspectives on ADHD beyond neurodiversity frameworks. The episode addresses a mixed audience explicitly: researchers, practitioners, parents, students and those with lived experience. Questions build from the conceptual to the practical, closing by asking what the audience should stop being certain about. Find out more

    27 min
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About

The British Educational Research Association (BERA) is the leading authority on educational research in the UK, supporting and representing the community of scholars, practitioners and everyone engaged in and with educational research both nationally and internationally.BERA is a membership association and learned society committed to advancing research quality, building research capacity and fostering research engagement. We aim to inform the development of policy and practice by promoting the best quality evidence produced by educational research.This podcast consists of research informed content on key educational issues. This podcast gives our members a voice to promote their research and features educational leaders and experts speaking about hot topic issues in Education. Our aim is to produce and promote episodes that attract policymakers, parents, teachers, educational leaders, members of school communities, politicians, and anyone who is interested in education today.

Information

  • Creator
    BERA UK
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    84
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 BERA UK Podcast
  • Show Website
    BERA UK Podcast