Education MA

University of Bedfordshire

This MA fosters evidence-based practice, encouraging you to make direct and meaningful connections between the course and your own experiences and aspirations. It engages you with key and contemporary issues in education and broadens your knowledge of educational ideas and research findings, prompting you to identify and justify recommendations for further action. This places you in the best position to develop your work as a classroom practitioner or leader, usually in schools, the lifelong-learning sector and universities.Intermediate qualifications available:Postgraduate certificate – 60 credits at Master’s levelPostgraduate diploma – 120 credits at Master’s levelWhat will you study?Studying our full-time Education MA course will provide you with in-depth knowledge and skills around education systems and policy for you to work with children and adults in educational contexts. Throughout the course, we engage with contemporary debates around teaching and learning, in the UK, and globally. The course includes a range of core and optional units, to provide opportunities for students to develop and specialise based on their own interests. This is supported by our assessment policy, which provides students options to focus on particular topics of most interest to them within our units. To better understand children and their needs, our unit in Children’s Voice: Researching and Analysing Children’s Lives will allow you to examine children’s lived experiences based on tensions within family, welfare and education policies. This may involve considering how low pay or long working hours of parents could place constraints on family time available to children, and the implications of issues such as this for policy and practice.Similarly, you will investigate issues around social justice in relation to education in our Citizenship and Welfare in the 21st Century unit. Here, you will explore challenges posed towards education and welfare and the questions this raises for human rights, diversity and culture. As an educator, child development is a core part of your learning and practice, and this is where our Early Years Education and Care unit will introduce you to theoretical concepts surrounding young children’s learning. Another crucial area to your educational practice involves Meeting Diverse Needs, and you will do this by engaging with research literature on how diverse needs can be supported in educational settings to promote inclusion in your professional practice. With the same approach to diversity, you will explore the development of international education systems in our Education and International Development unit to analyse the different factors that influence the educational experiences of children. Finally, you will complete a Dissertation in Education in a research area that interests you. To help you with this, our Research Methods in the Workplace unit aims to develop your research skills through a range of activities.CareersAs a Master’s graduate of this course you will have the confidence knowledge and critical skills to prepare and present a strong application to senior posts in the field of education.Previous graduates have gone on to take up enhanced roles within their organisation. Some have used the research skills they have gained to engage in future research and undertake PhD or EdD study.