Introduction to the group

THRiVE is an interdisciplinary group researching ways to promote positive educational environments and wider societal transformations that enable everyone, especially young people, to thrive. THRiVE research themes include peace education, wellbeing, inclusion, social and educational justice, gender, disability, race, colonialism, and global youth cultures.

Launched in 2025, THRiVE’s work encompasses transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary and multi-method research, drawing on both quantitative methods and qualitative enquiry, alongside arts, visual, spatial and narrative-based methods. THRiVe academics consider the ways that direct and indirect structural, symbolic and cultural violence create harm within modern institutions and societies, as well how to think and act differently to bring about positive change. THRiVe research develops and evaluates initiatives and programmes and amplifies the voices of minoritised communities, to rigorously expose the depth of social and educational inequalities they face.

Two student-led groupings are connected to THRiVE: CPERG, the Cambridge Peace Education Research Group; and the Wellbeing and Inclusion Special Interest Group. Alongside THRiVE activities, they bring together students, alumni, activists and researchers around the world through their programmes of online and face to face seminars, conferences, reading groups and networking and wellbeing activities.

THRiVE Members

The group is led by Hilary Cremin and Ros McLellan. Other members include:

• Pallavi Banerjee
• Angharad Butler-Rees
• Claire Crawford
• Jo-Anne Dillabough
• Sonia Ilie
• Jillian Lauer
• Elizabeth Maber

Research & Research Projects

The Cambridge Positive Peace Education (CPPE) Hub builds upon Hilary Cremin’s decades-long research in peace education. It is due to launch in April 2025 as a pilot study for 3 years, and benefits from philanthropic funding. The CPPE Hub will employ a fulltime Research Associate, alongside other smaller posts, and will review existing resources for peace education globally. It will implement case studies in two countries, and develop peace educator, policy maker, and young people networks. The findings from this research will be used to create the Positive Peace Education Framework and Curriculum, including a suite of resources to support peace education integration into classrooms, school districts, and national curricula. The collective work of the project will be shared on an interactive digital platform, the CPPE Digital Hub, that will serve as a lasting legacy of the project and help maximise its global reach.

Hilary Cremin’s Positive Peace Education in Kazakhstan project is a collaboration with Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. It launched in 2023 for 3 years, as part of a larger project that involves implementing positive peace education case studies in 10 schools and using the findings to feed into national curriculum and teacher training in Kazkhstan, as well as informing peace education research and development globally.

The Mappa Mundi Project is currently seeking philanthropic funding for a three-year pilot that involves collaboration between Hilary Cremin from the Faculty of Education, Eleanor Drage from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and writer and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig. It includes a team of leading gender, technology, education, and storytelling experts from across the University working in partnership with global NGOs like the Women of the World Foundation. The Mappa Mundi Project aims to counteract the erasure of women’s perspectives online by creating an interactive digital atlas that documents and shares women’s voices, experiences, and contributions globally. Through innovative research, immersive storytelling, and data-driven insights, this project seeks to create an impactful and accessible educational resource that supports learners, influences policymakers, and ensures that women’s narratives are seen, heard, and valued.

Ros McLellan is developing and testing a theory of change for the United Kingdom Sailing Association in the Charting the Impact of UKSA Programmes project. UKSA are funding this relatively small-scale project to better understand the nature of the work they do with young people, many of whom have struggled in school settings. The first phase was completed last year and was positively received by their Trustees with the current and final phase due to finish in September.

Ros McLellan is also working with another charity, Innov8, who provide a practical workshop-based programme of activity as alternative provision for primary and secondary aged students. The project will explore young people’s experiences of working with mentors in these workshops through arts-based participatory methods. The charity are funding the work and the work will start shortly and is due to complete in December 2025.

Ros McLellan has also collaborated with Fiona Peacock and Monique Beckett (an ex-TP Masters student currently working for the ADRC and in private counselling practice) in an AHRC IAA Impact Fund project that recently completed entitled Hard to Reach Services, not Hard to Reach Children. The focus was on developing video resources showcasing the potential of Minecraft as a psychotherapeutic tool for practice.

Ros McLellan is also just about to start a new Leverhulme Trust funded project as a Co-I with colleagues from Reading and University College Dublin exploring the potential of story book books to improve learning outcomes in secondary mathematics and reduce maths anxiety, the latter of which is experienced by significant numbers of young people and thus has the potential to transform learning experience.

Pallavi Banerjee leads a UKRI (ESRC)-funded, policy-focused project investigating educational inequalities. By applying behavioural insights to education, she examines how demographic, structural and systemic factors influence student attainment and experiences. Her research involves quantitative analyses of linked administrative datasets and longitudinal surveys, through which she has developed new analytical models. By closely engaging with policymakers, Pallavi’s project generates evidence-based recommendations designed to improve equity, inform strategic policy decisions, and drive meaningful change within educational systems.

Angharad Butler-Rees is currently undertaking a study entitled ‘Unfolding Young Lives: Post-21 Trajectories of Disabled Young People in England’, which is being funded through the Faculty’s Research Development Fund. The study serves as a continuation of a 3-year Leverhulme Trust Funded study which explored how disability and social class intersect in framing young people’s educational trajectories. The overarching aim of the project is to understand when and how disability is translated into socio-economic disadvantage in adulthood.

Angharad Butler-Rees is also a Co-I on the ‘Access to learning-Learning to Access Study’ a 3-year study in collaboration with the University of Birmingham funded by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), investigating the implementation of the new ‘Curriculum Framework for Children and Young People with Vision Impairment’ and its impacts on the learning and educational inclusion of children and young people with vision impairment. The project consists of a longitudinal qualitative study, involving children/young people, their teachers, parents and specialists from across all four nations of the UK.

Alongside her research activates, Angharad Butler-Rees has also been awarded funding for a joint project through the University Diversity Fund. This will consist of a participatory and arts-based project exploring disabled and neurodivergent students’ experiences of studying at the University of Cambridge. The project aims to raise awareness of disability culture, pride and identity. The project will further highlight the space that disabled people occupy in higher education and provide disabled students with a platform to share and narrate their own experiences of occupying and navigating this space, using creative methods.

Claire E. Crawford – is Co-I of the ICET Head Start into HE programme with NNECL (National Network for the Education of Care Leavers).

Jillian Lauer is undertaking a project, ‘The Developmental Psychology of American Coloniality’, funded through the Faculty of Education Research Development Fund. The project aims to characterise children’s social beliefs about different groups in settler colonial contexts, such as the United States. It also explores how primary school curricula on colonialism influence children’s understandings of indigenous peoples, contemporary social (in)equalities, and national progress. The overarching goal is to understand how children make sense of their country’s colonial history, how this shapes their perceptions of modern-day inequalities and injustice, and the most effective ways of teaching children about both historical and current colonial practices.

Jo-Anne Dillabough is UK lead and elected working group leader on a European wide network of scholars addressing the topic of rising neonationalisms and shifting geopolitics in HE funded by COST EU network funding grant. She is also the COST WG1 leader developing a European infrastructure for the protection of gender studies in Higher Education institutions across Europe under the threat of elimination due to populist and authoritarian politics (Hungary, Serbia, Turkey).

Jo-Anne Dillabough has just completed a large scale ESRC grant exploring the relationship between the rise of populism and authoritarianism and its impact on HE in four countries: South Africa, UK, Turkey and Hungary. She is also currently developing a bid on the rise of global right networks and their impact on political and social trust within the HE sector, with Elizabeth Maber.

Elizabeth Maber has recently completed a large-scale ESRC project on higher education, states of precarity and conflict as co-investigator. She has also had a substantial role in the Edu-Peace Network and has led a project on community education responses to heightened emergency, in Bangladesh and Thailand.

Sonia Ilie currently leads a research project funded by the Nuffield Foundation exploring young people’s creative choices and chances at critical transition points into and beyond further and higher education into the creative sector. Using large-scale national administrative data sets and arts-based qualitative methods, the project looks to understand the individual, institutional, and structural barriers to creative choices in education and later on.

Sonia Ilie is lead evaluator of a large collaborative UKRI-funded project improving fairness in doctoral admissions at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Working across sixteen departments and doctoral training partnerships across the two universities, the Close the Gap project looks to embed a permanent shift away from deficit-driven admissions structures, cultures, and practices to benefits-based models of assessing academic potential and offer anti-racist approaches to doctoral admissions.