Looking Back, Looking Forward…
Hello BELMAS Members,
Happy 2026 to you all! As all of us know in education, each year goes by in the blink of an eye… it seems about 5 days ago that we were all together in ‘windy Brighton’, as our US colleagues now refer to it, with a parallel to Chicago, having been blown along the seafront last July! But the sun shone for our 2025 conference, and many, particularly from the International School Leadership Development Network (ISLDN) – were pleased to visit Blatchington Mill School and hear about how the involvement of the Local Authority in Brighton is doing things differently to elsewhere across England; to hear from our panellists with Megan Crawford and terrific keynotes with both Ann Lopez and Toby Greany; and take part in numerous sessions, present posters, and attend face to face RIG events… thanks and congratulations go to all involved.
Attention turned immediately afterwards to the BELMAS Conference 2026 in Cardiff! Abstracts were reviewed in the run up to the Christmas break, so #BELMAS2026 is now well underway, and we are looking forward to highlighting exciting Educational Leadership developments in Wales, with their inclusive anti-racist policies explained with Chan Haughton, and innovative curriculum and professional learning panel with both Alma Harris and Kevin Palmer, former Deputy Director of Professional Learning for Wales, and gaining our always important international perspective this year from David Gurr, who is also a key member of our ISLDN steering group.
Autumn 2025 then disappeared in a flash with a range of events that were really great for BELMAS… a group of us took turns to hold a BELMAS stand at both ECER conference in Belgrade and at the BERA conference in Sussex in September, when the two events clashed. It’s great that Trustees are able to help out at these events, but also terrific when BELMAS members come along to say hello to us and can talk enthusiastically about their work in RIGs, Lunchtime Sessions, and intersections between BELMAS and their students.
Just as a reminder, if any of you are running programmes, we offer specific discount codes per HEI, to encourage your students with discount off our already much reduced ECR membership. I would particularly like to thank doctoral students who have been advocating for BELMAS in the past year or two. There is a slide deck available from the BELMAS office, where our postgraduate students can talk about us as part of our engagement with Learned Societies who support the research trajectory of Early Career Researchers. A particular mention should go to Cristina Motoca at Roehampton, and Amanda Hobbs at Winchester, who have both delivered sessions to their student cohort, on the benefits of BELMAS membership – thank you. The idea of this is that you can talk at whole social science events (or even wider graduate researcher events!) about our specific part of the landscape.
With the number of redundancies that there have been in the sector (specifically in England) in the last few years, we are finding more and more doctoral students coming across us by accident! As they are not being supervised by specialists in the field, we know that when papers in both EMAL and MiE are read online by doctoral students and even experienced staff, the link is not being made through to us as a Society… whereas when people read paper copies in the past the logo was clearly visible – but online the link to us is far less obvious… so please take all opportunities to mention the great work that we are doing on Awards, Bursaries, and Grants, and the wider networking benefits of membership.
In 2025, the BELMAS Office supported 10 Awards, 2 Bursaries, 4 Grants; produced 49 newsletters and put out over 400 LinkedIn posts; hosted 30 RIG events across 12 RIGs, 3 Lunchtime Sessions, 7 events throughout ECR Month, and 4 Other events, in addition to our 2025 Conference that was attended by 210 delegates. My personal thanks go to our small office team, who continue to go above and beyond on a regular basis, to ensure that all this work is supported, but they also support our five Board meetings a year and the workload of five sub-committees, where all this work takes place.
I would also like to thank both Wendy Conrad and Andy Allen who responded to the callout for RIG Coordination, as we have been offered the opportunity to produce a set of books with Myers Educational Press from across our Research Interest Groups, so watch out for more information on this in 2026. If any of the other RIG convenors would like to support this ongoing work of the RIGs, there is room for more than two people in this role, so please do get in touch.
My thanks also go to the people who have served as Trustees on our Board, and whose terms are now finished, Saeeda Shah, Caitlin Donnelly and Kevin Richardson. Saeeda will, of course, continue to serve on our Distinguished Service Award Advisory Board, and this DSA Board now has a rolling entry, so if you have someone from our field to nominate, please do look at the pages on the website when the award opens in January. An international version of this award is also being launched in 2026.
2026 is the final year in my three years as BELMAS Chair, and I have been delighted to represent BELMAS at AERA, UCEA, and BERA, over these years, and oversee the great team that we have. I will of course continue to advocate for us and the importance of the space in which we hold, moving forward. This Spring term, the Board will vote for a new Chair, and we will keep you posted on who that successor will be. We will then have a handover in the Summer Term before that new Chair starts on the 1st September 2026. I will leave the Board on the 31st December 2026, as I have served since 2016, and it is both right and compliant with charity law, that we continue to change the personnel around the table. I would like to see a more diverse group of BELMAS Trustees elected this summer, so please do have a think about who you could reach out to to suggest they stand for our Board, as this is a very important part of our inclusive organisation.
Wishing you all a healthy and happy 2026, and as always, any comments are welcomed to me directly on the Chair@belmas.org.uk email.
Deb Outhwaite
You can read more from our Chair here.
