Welcome to the University of Oxford Department of Education

Oxford has been making a major contribution to the field of education for over 100 years and today this Department has a world class reputation for research, for teacher education and for its Masters and doctoral programmes.

Research. The Department has an outstanding research profile: it was rated first equal in the UK in the 2008 RAE. There is a wide range of funded research projects based in the Department and many of these projects have had a major impact on national policy. In the words of the RAE panel, there is evidence of a ‘strong research environment with strong leadership across a coherent structure of research themes and groups’. Over 95% of research outputs were judged to be ‘international’ and over 25% (the highest percentage in the UK) were seen as being ‘world leading’. 

Research in the Department is organised around three major themes:

1. Learning: Affect, Behaviour and Cognition
2. Learning: Policy and Society
3. Learning: Teaching and Professional Practice

Within each of these themes there are several smaller research groups. All staff and doctoral students belong to one or more of these research groups, each of which has its own seminar programme to which graduate students often contribute. In addition, the Department as a whole sponsors regular seminars and public lectures which attract distinguished national and international speakers.

Teacher Education. Our secondary PGCE course has an international reputation for the quality of its work which we undertake in close collaboration with local Oxfordshire secondary schools. Over many years, the programme has consistently been given the highest possible marks by Ofsted in their inspections. As from this year we will be launching an innovative new Masters in Learning and Teaching for classroom teachers; again, we are working in close collaboration with local schools on its development and delivery.

Graduate Studies. The Department offers one of the strongest graduate studies programmes in the UK with a range of full and part-time MSc courses and a lively doctoral programme which is recognised for national scholarships by the ESRC. In all, we have over 130 graduate students registered for higher degrees in any one year, many of them from overseas. As the 2008 RAE panel commented, the Department has ‘excellent facilities for the large number of full time research students who are well integrated into the research of the department’.

Much has changed at this Department over the years, particularly recently, with a range of excellent new and refurbished buildings and with expanded staff numbers. What has not changed is our commitment to excellence and to relevance in all that we do. Our aim is to provide an intellectually rich but supportive environment in which to study, to research and to teach and, through our work, to contribute to the improvement of all phases of public education, both in the UK and internationally. If you share our aims and would like to know more about the Department or any of the activities described here, then please get in touch with me.

Professor John Furlong
Director

A poem for the Department of Education

A poem entitled 'Garden' has been written and presented to the Department by Dr Lesley Saunders who has a long-standing association with the Department and is currently an honorary Research Fellow here.

The poem is dedicated to the memory of the landscape architect Dame Sylvia Crowe (1901 – 1997) who was commissioned in the 1960s to design the garden at 15 Norham Gardens for the then Department of Educational Studies.  All the ecological principles she espoused and illustrated in her book Garden Design (first published 1958, third edition published by Garden Art 1994) are intimately enacted in this courtyard-like space: unity, scale, space, time, light and shade, tone and texture.

Download the poem illustrated with photos of the garden.