Sara Bragg

University College London | UCL · Institute of Education

From education and achievement to mental health and well-being to violence and aggression, the ‘state of boys’ has long been a feature of UK (and global) educational, societal and political debate. Against this backdrop, a raft of evidence-based research has not only contested the notion of a singular ‘state’ of boys, but also complicated the categ...

From education and achievement to mental health and well-being to violence and aggression, the ‘state of boys’ has long been a feature of UK (and global) educational, societal and political debate. Against this backdrop, a raft of evidence-based research has not only contested the notion of a singular ‘state’ of boys, but also complicated the categ...

Evidence from intervention evaluations suggests that achieving meaningful and lasting social, behavioural and attitudinal change from relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) in schools requires more than just a curriculum. Whole-school approaches appear particularly promising since they work at multiple levels. For instance, they may: engage...

Background Reducing unintended teenage pregnancy and promoting adolescent sexual health remains a priority in England. Both whole-school and social-marketing interventions are promising approaches to addressing these aims. However, such interventions have not been rigorously trialled in the UK and it is unclear if they are appropriate for delivery...

Background The UK still has the highest rate of teenage births in western Europe. Teenagers are also the age group most likely to experience unplanned pregnancy, with around half of conceptions in those aged < 18 years ending in abortion. After controlling for prior disadvantage, teenage parenthood is associated with adverse medical and social outc...

In 2018, reflecting in this journal on the arrival of the ‘age of consent’ into sexuality education, Jen Gilbert questioned what would happen to a concept drawn in part from legal contexts, but partly also driven by the passion of feminist activists, when it met the demands and logics – the learning outcomes and lesson plans – of the classroom. Thi...

Background: Improving adolescent sexual health remains a priority in the UK. Whole-school interventions represent promising approaches, but they have not been rigorously tested in the UK context. Involving potential recipients, implementers and other key stakeholders in the development of such complex interventions prior to formal piloting and eval...

Background: Whole-school interventions represent promising approaches to promoting adolescent sexual health, but have not been rigorously trialled in the UK. The importance of involving intended beneficiaries, implementers and other key stakeholders in the co-production of such complex interventions prior to costly implementation and evaluation stu...

Background: The benefits of involving intended recipients, implementers and other stakeholders in the co-production of public health interventions are widely promoted. Practical accounts reflecting on the process and value of co-production in intervention design, however, remain scarce. We outline our approach to the co-production of two multi-comp...

The e-book is available from https://cpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.brighton.ac.uk/dist/b/1590/files/2017/08/new_practices_new_publics_FINAL-21layp5.pdf

This paper explores the views of young people aged 12–14 on gender diversity, drawing upon school-based qualitative data from a study conducted in England in 2015–2016. Although earlier feminist and queer research in schools often found evidence of variable local gender cultures and gender non-conformity, we argue that the contemporary context, wit...

How can we know about children's everyday lives in a digitally saturated world? What is it like to grow up in and through new media? What happens between the ages of 7 and 15 and does it make sense to think of maturation as mediated? These questions are explored in this innovative book, which synthesizes empirical documentation of children's everyd...

How can we know about children's everyday lives in a digitally saturated world? What is it like to grow up in and through new media? What happens between the ages of 7 and 15 and does it make sense to think of maturation as mediated? These questions are explored in this innovative book, which synthesizes empirical documentation of children's everyd...

How can we know about children’s everyday lives in a digitally saturated world? What is it like to grow up in and through new media? What happens between the ages of 7 and 15 and does it make sense to think of maturation as mediated? These questions are explored in this innovative book, which synthesizes empirical documentation of children’s everyd...

How can we know about children’s everyday lives in a digitally saturated world? What is it like to grow up in and through new media? What happens between the ages of 7 and 15 and does it make sense to think of maturation as mediated? These questions are explored in this innovative book, which synthesizes empirical documentation of children’s everyd...

This handbook is designed to support teachers to introduce human rights to children aged 3 - 5. There are five themed lesson plans, each focusing on relevant articles proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human rights.

Concepts of school ‘ethos’ or ‘culture’ have been widely debated in education since the 1980s. This is partly as a consequence of marketisation, partly because ethos has been identified as a low-cost route to school improvement. Corporate, authoritarian, and most recently ‘military’ models of ethos have been widely promulgated in the UK. Another si...

This article discusses ‘Choice and Challenge’ as a tool for school improvement and as a ‘practicable pedagogy’ that attempts to embody the principles of ‘learning without limits’, rejecting ability grouping and labelling. As considered here, ‘Choice and Challenge’ emerges specifically from practice at the Wroxham School, led by Alison Peacock, whic...

This article provides a critical overview of the contribution of British Cultural Studies to research on contemporary youth cultures, and some indications of how it should develop in the future. While the early work in this tradition has sometimes been unfairly attacked by subsequent researchers, the approach is in need of some careful reappraisal...

Abstract This paper reports on a small ‘seed’ project that investigated perceptions and uses of social media-based professional learning networks in the context of teaching and teacher education, which was funded during 2014 by the Communities and Cultures Network+. The project aimed to engage with contrasting perspectives on the potential for d...

Familiar responses to the issue of boys and sexualization lead in opposite directions. Some suggest that we really don’t need to worry about them at all, as a mother in my earlier research argued: ‘Well, you don’t need to worry about a wee boy dressing to look older and looking tarty or anything’ (Buckingham et al., 2010). Others, such as those bel...

For some time, those who would study youth have been enjoined to be Janus-faced: on the one hand, to remember that ‘youth’, like ‘childhood’, is a social construction; but on the other, never to forget that children and youth are ‘social actors’ (James, Jenks and Prout, 1999; Jeffrey, 2010). As a social construction, ‘youth’ is to be interrogated,...

This article argues that specific spatial imaginaries are embedded in current debates about school ethos and research methods. It takes the reader on a journey around an English multicultural primary school supported by the creative learning program Creative Partnerships, exploring how creative arts practices (re)configured sociospatial relations w...

Parents are contradictorily positioned within the “sexualisation of childhood” debate. They (“we”) are assumed to be concerned about sexualisation, and are urged to challenge it through campaigning, “saying no,” discussing “media messages” with children, and so on. Yet “irresponsible” consumption practices, particularly by mothers, are also held re...

Children and young people in the early twenty-first century encounter, and creatively adapt to, a range of cultural phenomena in an increasingly mediated, commercialised and globalised world. Children and young people's cultural worlds offers a critical introduction to childhood in the digital age. Childhood innocence is a concept that often underp...

In recent years, the ‘sexualisation of childhood’ has moved into the centre ground of public policy and debate internationally, despite the conceptual confusions and inadequate evidence surrounding the processes denoted by the term. This paper focuses primarily on the most recent of several UK government‐commissioned reviews and reports, the Bailey...

For many years, the concept of 'student voice' was seen as a marginal issue for educators, the preserve of a passionate, dedicated minority. The literature on voice had to persuade and convince as much as to analyze, whilst the 'emancipatory', democratic intentions and outcomes of practitioners were often taken for granted. Now, however, 'student v...

This thinkpiece arises from personal reflection on researching ‘sexualisation’, on the individuals and issues encountered and on elements that were unspoken or more rarely voiced. It suggests that the discourse on sexualisation tends to construct an ‘other’ from which speakers distance themselves, variously defined as ‘bad’ mothers, sexualized girl...

This article reproduces and discusses a series of blog posts posted by academics in anticipation of the report on commercialisation, sexualisation and childhood, ‘Letting Children Be Children’ by Reg Bailey for the UK Department of Education in June 2011. The article discusses the difficulty of ‘translating’ scholarly work for the public in a conte...

As Stephen Ball and others have argued (e.g. Ball, 2007; Ball et al., 2010), education worldwide is increasingly subject to complex processes of commodification, commercialisation and privatisation. In England, the role of the state is being significantly redefined away from that of educational provider—the position it has occupied since 1870—towar...

This article presents a critical analysis of how the issue of childhood ‘sexualization’ – and the role of consumer culture within it – has been defined and framed, both within the public debate and in the academic research literature. It counterposes this with some evidence taken from a study conducted in Scotland in 2009/10 about the availability...

This review introduces readers to the field of consultation work with young people. It is not a comprehensive review of all published literature (as is, for instance, the review by Coad and Lewis, 2004), but it indicates some relevant references, broad schools of thought, major conceptual issues and practical approaches, as a guide for those who ar...

This project was commissioned in response to concerns raised in the Scottish Parliament's Equal Opportunities Committee about the prevalence of sexualised goods and products marketed to children. In the past few years, this issue has become a key area of public concern, although it is one that often invokes much broader emotions and anxieties, and...

[About the book] This book uncovers the significant impact that striptease culture is having on our media, relationships, educational and working lives. It is a welcome and much needed book. Western culture is exhibiting its fascination with sex in new, often surprising ways. Pole dancing is a form of keep fit, porn stars find work as agony aunts,...

This paper explores the perspectives of teachers who initially observed, and later came to participate in, a pupil voice initiative in a primary school. Such ‘marginal’ points of view are often neglected in discussions of youth participation. The article aims to demonstrate that whilst adult support for pupil voice is crucial in ensuring its succes...

‘Student voice’ is now taking a more central role in educational policy, guidance and thinking. As it does so, however, it becomes less clear how to interpret it: it can perhaps no longer be seen as a radical gesture that will necessarily challenge educational hierarchies. Drawing on qualitative research into one student participation project, ‘Stu...

The International Handbook of Student Experience in Elementary and Secondary School is the first handbook of its kind to be published. It brings together in a single volume the groundbreaking work of scholars who have conducted studies of student experiences of school in Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, England, Ghana, Ireland, Pakistan, and the Uni...

This article describes the genesis, development and evaluation of Media Relate, a project and teaching pack about media images of sex and relationships for use in school sex and relationship education and citizenship curricula, with young people aged 12–15. Media Relate was based on the findings of an earlier research project into young people's vi...

In this ‘dialogue’ article, the three editors of the special issue debate three key themes arising from the articles that follow. We discuss the dilemmas posed by the institutionalisation or ‘authorisation’ of media education within the formal education system; persistent questions about the role of media education as an intervention in the process...

Questions of cultural value, aesthetics and evaluative judgments have vexed media education since its inception. Whilst they continue to count heavily both in teachers’ conceptions of the work they do, and in students’ responses to it, they have become increasingly problematic in contemporary society. The diverse environments of contemporary school...

Children today are growing up much too soon, or so we are frequently told. They are being deprived of their childhood. Their essential innocence has been lost. Indeed, some would say that childhood itself is effectively being destroyed. For many people, perhaps the most troubling aspect of this phenomenon is to do with sex. Young people seem to be...

Collaborative enquiry can be a democratizing process in a school. It involves sharing and distributing leadership and encouraging all members of the school to be active 'enquirers' into the life and work of the school. This includes students. Without the involvement of the students it is not possible to enquire effectively either into the learning...

This article discusses parents' and young people's accounts of family television viewing, produced as part of a research project into responses to sexual content in the media. The analysis identifies how practices of media consumption, such as parents 'discussing' social issues in drama with their children, are gendered and gendering. These in turn...

In this chapter we discuss our research design, in order to help explain both the insights and the limitations of the results we present in subsequent chapters. Research is not a neutral conduit that extracts the ‘truth’ about a topic or about what participants ‘really’ feel and think about it. Our findings were shaped by our methods, the contexts...

According to conservative critics, the media are full of people endlessly ‘doing it’. In fact, it is still comparatively rare to find explicit representations of sexual behaviour in the mainstream media — and certainly in the media most children are likely to encounter. Of course, there is plenty of mild foreplay and strategic removal of garments....

Sharmaine (S, 11, P): I watch CBBC. When that’s finished I watch Neighbours. Then by six, ‘cause it finishes at six, I watch Home and Away and then about half an hour on to an hour then Emmerdale’s on so also I watch that. (…) Everybody’s talking about EastEnders as well, (…) everybody’s like ‘oh yeah did you see EastEnders last night’ and all that...

The public display of images of naked human bodies cannot be seen merely as a manifestation of our allegedly ‘sexualised’ modern culture. On the contrary, it has a very long history. Some of the earliest visual representations yet discovered feature images of the naked human form, clearly designed for the contemplative erotic gaze. The Victorian mo...

Courtney (N, 12, P): My mum doesn’t say anything about it [sex on television], because she knows I know everything about sex and relationships.

One of the most immediately striking (and perhaps predictable) differences across our sample was between the boys and the girls. As we noted in Chapter 2, girls tended to write in greater detail in their diaries, and drew more willingly on the conventions of the confessional diary form. In interviews, they often seemed more forthcoming, or at least...

Qualitative research of the kind we have reported in this book is rarely conclusive. Indeed, part of the aim of our study was precisely to open up the discussion of issues that, in our view, have often been prematurely closed down — not just in the public debate, but also in academic research. It is perhaps inevitable, therefore, that we should end...

Joseph (S, 12, P): We usually get videos Friday nights and that’s one night a week like we spend it as a family. Other times it’s just, my brother is going out and everything. (…) For all we care like it could be the worst film ever. But it’s the fact that we get to spend that one night with each other.

Ray (parent): Would you invite two people in your home to take drugs? Or would you invite two people into your home to have a fight in your living room? Would you invite people into your home to — maybe it would be two women — to kiss each other, or to hold hands? Would you invite them into your home to do that? (FG2S)

Are children today growing up too soon? How do they - and their parents - feel about media portrayals of sex and personal relationships? Are the media a corrupting influence, or a potentially positive and useful resource for young people? Drawing on an extensive research project, which investigated children's interpretations of sexual content in fi...

This pack contains examples of students conducting enquiries into learning and the conditions of learning at a classroom and school level, evidence of the impact of their work, and guidance about ways of providing basic training in research. Includes examples of students conducting enquiries into learning and the conditions of learning at classroom...

Presents a study of a student's horror video, to determine the informal knowledge evidenced in practical work for media literacy. Significance of media production to learning; Potential of production work for students of media literacy.

This thesis considers the implications of recent work in Cultural Studies for the teaching of contemporary popular culture. By taking horror films as its departure point, it addresses public debates and 'moral panics' about 'violent' genres, particularly recent proposals that education may act as an adjunct to centralised control and regulation of...

Criticizes the pedagogical issues of common methods of teaching young people about visual media via textual analysis. Excerpt from a class discussion of the horror film 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' in a media studies course in Britain; Possible rhetorical moves to claim status and material resources for cultural studies pedagogy; Criticism on critic...

About the book: Ill Effects revisits the 'media effects' debate. It asks why, when a particularly high-profile crime of violence is committed, there are those who blame film, television, video, pop music, and more recently, the Internet.

[About the book]: Visual media offer powerful communication opportunities. Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People explores the methodological, ethical, representational and theoretical issues surrounding image-based research with children and young people. It provides well-argued and illustrated resources to guide novice and experienc...

This report summarises the findings of an 18-month research project into ‘Youth Voice in the work of Creative Partnerships ‘, 2007-9, conducted by Sara Bragg, Helen Manchester, Dorothy Faulkner at the Open University, funded by the Arts Council England. Creative Partnerships (CP) was established in 2002 and is a ‘flagship creative learning programm...

About the book: It is a common ambition in society and government to make young people more creative. These aspirations are motivated by two key concerns: to make experience at school more exciting, relevant, challenging and dynamic; and to ensure that young people are able and fit to leave education and contribute to the creative economy that will...