Interdisciplinary research by THRiVE members at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education exploring how education can promote positive environments and wider societal transformations:
Our research themes:
- Peace education
- Wellbeing and inclusion
- Social and educational justice
- Gender, disability, race & colonialism
- Global youth cultures
Learn more about our research approach.
Our research and research projects
The Cambridge Positive Peace Education (CPPE) Hub
The Cambridge Positive Peace Education (CPPE) Hub builds upon Hilary Cremin’s decades-long research in peace education. As a three-year pilot study (2025-2028) supported by philanthropic funding, the CPPE Hub will incorporate a global review of peace education, case studies, networks, and the development of the CPPE Digital Hub.
Positive Peace Education in Kazakhstan
Collaboration with Nazarbayev University.
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.
Positive Peace Education Kazakhstan
The Mappa Mundi Project
In partnership with Eleanor Drage, Sandi Toksvig, and 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.
Charting the Impact of UKSA Programmes
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.
Innov8 Mentoring Project
Ros McLellan is also working with another charity exploring alternative education with Innov8. Innov8 provide a practical workshop-based programme of activity as alternative provision for primary and secondary aged students.
Hard to Reach Services, not Hard to Reach Children
An AHRC project with ADRC using Minecraft.
Ros McLellan has collaborated with Fiona Peacock and Monique Beckett in an AHRC IAA Impact Fund project that recently completed. The focus was on developing video resources showcasing the potential of Minecraft as a psychotherapeutic tool for practice.
Creating Accessible Services using Minecraft
Story Books & Mathematics Learning
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Ros McLellan with colleagues from Reading and University College Dublin are exploring the potential of story book books to improve learning outcomes in secondary mathematics and reduce maths anxiety.
Educational Inequalities Project
Funded by UKRI ESRC.
By applying behavioural insights to education, Pallavi Banerjee 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.
Unfolding Young Lives: Post-21 Trajectories of Disabled Young People in England
Faculty Research Development Fund
Angharad Butler-Rees is currently undertaking a study that 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.
Access to Learning-Learning to Access – Vision Impairment Study
Funded by RNIB.
A 3-year study by Angharad Butler-Rees in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, investigating the implementation of the new ‘Curriculum Framework for Children and Young People with Vision Impairment’.
Disability & Neurodiversity at Cambridge
Funded by the University Diversity Fund.
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.
ICET Head Start into HE
In partnership with NNECL.
Claire E. Crawford is Co-Investigator of the ICET Head Start into HE programme with NNECL (National Network for the Education of Care Leavers).
Developmental Psychology of American Coloniality
Funded by Faculty of Education Research Development Fund.
Led by Jillian Lauer, the project aims to characterise children’s social beliefs about different groups in settler colonial contexts, such as the United States. It explores how primary school curricula on colonialism influence children’s understandings of indigenous peoples, contemporary social (in)equalities, and national progress.
Gender Studies & Higher Education
Funded by COST EU.
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).
Higher Education, Populism & Authoritarianism
With ESRC.
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.
Edu-Peace Network
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.
Creative Choices Project
With Nuffield Foundation.
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.
Fairness in Doctoral Admissions
A UKRI-funded evaluation at Oxford and Cambridge.
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.