Professor Alice Bradbury

Profile

Alice Bradbury is Professor of Sociology of Education, and Co-Director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy (0-11 years) at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. Alice specialises in research on the impact of policy on classroom practices and inequalities in terms of class, gender and ‘race’. She has written extensively on primary education policy and its unequal impacts, including the books Understanding Early Years Inequality (2013); The Datafication of Primary and Early Years Education (2017, with Guy Roberts-Holmes); and Ability, Inequality and Post-Pandemic Schools (2021). Recent projects include two major ESRC-funded studies of the impact of Covid on primary education and a Department for Education-funded review of research on the impact of school closures for SAGE.

Research

Publications

• Bradbury, A. (2021) Ability, Inequality and Post-Pandemic Schools: Rethinking Contemporary Myths of Meritocracy Bristol: Policy Press 
• Bradbury, A. and Roberts-Holmes, G. (2017) The datafication of primary and early years education: playing with numbers, London: Routledge (Foundations and Futures in Education Series) 
• Bradbury, A. (2013) Understanding Early Years Inequality: Policy, assessment and young children’s identities, London: Routledge 
• Moss, G., Allen, R., Bradbury, A., Duncan, S., Harmey, S., & Levy, R. (2020). Primary teachers' experience of the COVID-19 lockdown–Eight key messages for policymakers going forward 
• Moss, G., Bradbury, A., Braun, A., Duncan, S. and Levy, R (2021) Learning through Disruption: Using schools’ experiences of COVID to build a more resilient education system. London: UCL Institute of Education 

Expertise