Question: What do you think is the main reason why children's learning becomes hindered and how does your work focus on improving this.

Katie Allen answered on 7 Mar 2023:

There are so many things that affect how well children can learn. Things like attendance, behaviour, but I focus on cognitive things so what goes on in their minds. I look a lot at things like working memory (how much information people can hold and process) which people have shown to make a huge difference because if you can’t hold and process much information it limits how much you can learn. At the minute I’m looking at how we can understand what influences how well children learn and then I’ll start to look at interventions to help children learn better. We need to do the understanding bit first though so we know where to focus the interventions.