➡ Where: UCL, London (IOE, 20 Bedford Way, Committee Room 1) – IN-PERSON EVENT ONLY
➡ Date: Friday 3rd October 2025
➡ Time: 2.00pm – 3.30pm (UK time)
As part of our ECR Month line-up, we invite you to the next event from the Gender & Educational Leadership RIG, ‘The Age of Identity and the Return of Populism: What This Means for Educators and Educational Research Today’.
Populism in its current form is a real and present danger to public education in the UK and across the world. Its rise and impact in education have multiple origins, but limitations in recent developments around identity in education have created a space for populists to occupy.
We will be joined by guest speaker, Andy Hargreaves, who will outline the threats that populism poses to public funding and public good, to intellectual freedom and integrity in higher education, and to equity, diversity and inclusion among pupils and their teachers in schools today.
Drawing on his 2024 co-authored book, ‘The Age of Identity’, as well as ‘The Making of an Educator’, his new memoir of the first 15 years of his career in education during the rise of Thatcherism, Andy will set out the origins, purposes, storylines, and strategies of populism in relation to public education.
Counterintuitively, he will argue that combatting populism requires understanding it, and understanding the needs and frustrations among many of the people who are drawn to it and who feel they have not been heard, seen, or supported by democratic governments and educational systems today. This will lead him to set out 4 strategic responses to populism in schools and in how to talk about teaching and learning to the public.
Please note, this event is free to BELMAS members and £5.00 for non-members. To ensure you receive your free ticket, please log in on the BELMAS website before booking.
If you pay the non-member fee to attend and then become a BELMAS Member within a month of the event taking place, please let us know and we will refund the £5 fee.
Registration will close at midnight (UK) on Monday 29th September 2025.
Andy Hargreaves
Andy Hargreaves grew up in Accrington, Lancashire. He now holds professorial positions at the University of Ottawa in Canada and Boston College in the US. An author or editor of almost 40 books, Hargreaves is one of the most cited education scholars alive. He has received 10 outstanding book awards. Andy is the founder of the Journal of Educational Change and the Journal of Professional Capital and Community. He holds three honorary doctorates, including from the University of Greater Manchester. Andy is an education adviser to the First Minister of Scotland, and for the Minister of Education for New Brunswick. He has been honoured in the UK, Canada, the US, and Australia, for services to public education and educational research, and he was awarded Boston College’s Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award in 2015. In 2023, Andy was named as Canada’s Post-Secondary Educator of the Year.
Andy is Past President of the International Congress of School Effectiveness and Improvement, 2018-2020; and is co-founder & President of the ARC education collaboratory: a group of governments committed to broadly defined excellence, equity, well-being, inclusion, democracy and human rights in education. Andy’s most recent books are The Making of an Educator: Living Through and Learning from the Great Education Shift (2025), Leadership from the Middle (2024) and The Age of Identity (with Dennis Shirley) (2023).
You can learn more at www.andyhargreaves.com or on X @hargreavesbc & Bluesky @ahargreaves.bsky.social.
Joining instructions will be sent out the day before the event, so please keep an eye on your inbox for these. We look forward to seeing you at the event!
