• Skip to content
  • Skip to footer
  • Accessibility options
University of Brighton
  • About us
  • Business and
    employers
  • Alumni and
    supporters
  • For
    students
  • For
    staff
  • Accessibility
    options
Open menu
Home
Home
  • Close
  • Study
    • Courses and subjects
    • Find a course
    • A-Z course list
    • Explore our subjects
    • Academic departments
    • Visiting the university
    • Explore online
    • Online events
    • Virtual tours
    • Chat to our students and staff
    • Open days
    • Applicant days
    • Order a prospectus
    • Ask a question
    • Studying here
    • Clearing 2021
    • Accommodation and locations
    • Applying
    • Undergraduate
    • Postgraduate
    • Transferring from another university
    • The Student Contract
    • International students
    • Fees and finance
    • Advice and help
    • Advice for students
    • Advice for parents and carers
    • Advice for schools and teachers
    • Managing your application
    • Undergraduate
    • Postgraduate
  • Research and enterprise
    • Research and enterprise
    • Research and enterprise organisation
    • Brighton Futures – our themes
    • Centres of Research and Enterprise Excellence (COREs)
    • Research and Enterprise Groups (REGs)
    • Our research database
    • Information for business
    • Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP)
    • Postgraduate research degrees
    • PhD research disciplines and programmes
    • PhD funding opportunities and studentships
    • How to apply for your PhD
    • Research environment
    • Investing in research careers
    • Strategic plan
    • Research concordat
    • News, events, publications and films
    • Research and enterprise news
    • Research and enterprise public events
    • Inaugural lectures
    • Research publications and films
    • Academic staff search
  • About us
  • Business and employers
  • Alumni, supporters and giving
  • Current students
  • Staff
  • Accessibility
Search our site
Checkland Building, Falmer and Amex Stadium, panorama
Research and enterprise
  • Research organisation
  • Postgraduate research degrees
  • News and events
  • Research environment
  • Postgraduate research degrees
    • Postgraduate research degrees
    • PhD-films
    • Our postgraduate research disciplines
    • Funding and studentships
    • Apply for a PhD
    • Support and training
    • Research Masters
    • Postgraduate virtual events
    • Contact us
  • Our postgraduate research disciplines
    • Our postgraduate research disciplines
    • Archaeology | Archaeological Sciences PhD
    • Art and creative practices PhD
    • Biology PhD | Biomaterials PhD
    • Built-Environment-PhD
    • Business and management PhD
    • Chemistry PhD
    • Civil engineering PhD
    • Computing PhD
    • Conservation Ecology and Zoonosis PhD
    • Criminology
    • Cultural studies PhD | Global studies PhD
    • Design PhD | Architecture PhD
    • Digital media and culture PhD
    • Ecology and environmental management
    • Education Policy and Practice
    • Engineering PhD
    • English literature PhD
    • Environmental communication PhD
    • Film, screen and popular culture PhD
    • Geology and Earth Science PhD
    • Health and wellbeing PhD | Resilience PhD
    • History of design PhD | History of art PhD
    • History PhD
    • Human geography PhD
    • Linguistics and language PhD
    • Mathematics and statistics PhD
    • Media communications PhD
    • Medicines Optimisation
    • Neuroscience PhD
    • Nuclear physics PhD
    • Nursing PhD | Midwifery PhD
    • Occupational therapy PhD
    • Philosophy, politics and ethics PhD
    • Physiotherapy PhD
    • Podiatry PhD
    • Politics PhD
    • Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD)
    • Psychology and Community Psychology
    • Regenerative medicine PhD
    • Sociology PhD
    • Sport and exercise science PhD
    • Sport and leisure cultures PhD
    • Tourism and hospitality PhD
  • Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD)

Professional Doctorate in Education EdD

As a Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) student at the University of Brighton, you are joining one of the pioneering institutions for this qualification.

The EdD at the University of Brighton was first validated in September 2000 and was recognised as unique at that time. Its focus was, and continues to be, on the contribution that critical, original professional knowledge from research and reflection can make to professional practice.

Your route into the EdD will first be via the Education MRes and this will provide a platform for development towards the EdD programme.

The EdD programme offers research-based professional development at doctoral level to experienced professional education practitioners. Students on the programme represent a range of educational settings including schools and higher education. Successful graduates of the programme are expected to contribute to the advancement of knowledge in professional practice within their field of educational responsibility.

Students gaining an EdD have used their expertise to enhance their capacity within existing senior roles in education or to go on to a variety of different roles including academic posts and management positions within their areas of professional expertise.

Since 2010, the University of Brighton’s EdD has also been offered in Mauritius in partnership with the Mauritian Institute of Education.

Apply now for your MRes/EdD

 

Please note that your route into the EdD will first be via the Education MRes.

MRes/EdD Professional doctorate programme details

Students are supported by a structure of stages. The programme provides a research-based, flexible, and practice-focused experience. Its developmental, ‘spiral’ model distinguishes it from many other national EdD models.

In stage 1 (two years part-time, 1 year full-time on the Education MRes) students are supported by a programme of small group seminars and assignments as well as individual tutorials to develop the skills and knowledge to conduct practitioner research and to prepare a Research Plan for their thesis.

In stage 2 (five years part-time only) students embark on their thesis research work.

As a student on the Professional Doctorate in Education, EdD, programme, you will undertake applied, practice-based research, combining theoretical analysis with fieldwork data collection to produce leading edge studies. In stage 2 of the EdD programme, when you are researching for your thesis, you will benefit from a supervisory team comprising two members of academic staff with expertise in your area of interest.

Depending on your research specialism you may also have an additional external supervisor from another school or another research institution.

Key information

As an EdD student at Brighton, you will

  • benefit from a supervisory team comprising 2-3 members of academic staff. Depending on your research specialism you may also have an additional supervisor from another school, another research institution, or an external partner from government or industry.
  • benefit from access to a range of electronic resources via the University’s Online Library, as well as to the physical book and journal collections housed within the Aldrich Library and other campus libraries.

Some of our supervisors

Profile photo for Dr Alison Barnes

Dr Alison Barnes

Alison’s supervisory interests include learning and teaching in primary schools and in particular, mathematics pedagogy and learning, including the role of affect and emotions. She is interested in supervising studies in these area and those adopting intervention or action research methodologies.

Profile photo for Dr Nadia Edmond

Dr Nadia Edmond

I currently supervise doctoral students (PhD and EdD), and am interested in supervising new doctoral students, in the following areas:

Professionalism/professional identities/professional development and learning;

Higher Education pedagogy and policy;

Diversity and inclusion in Higher Education;

The development of learning and professional knowledge through postgraduate study.

I am a critical realist and welcome supporting research from that perspective. 

Profile photo for Dr Mark Erickson

Dr Mark Erickson

I supervise students across a range of social science disciplines, although my main discipline is sociology.  I am interested in supervising projects in sociology of science and technology / science and technology studies, sociology of work and employment, social theory. Projects I currently supervise are researching science and technology, work and employment, climate change / emergency, communing / the commons, trade union studies, gender and design, children and migration, and mental health.

Applications to the following proposal are very welcome: Managing science: workers and management in the replication and reproduction of scientific knowledge

Despite Wajcman’s exhortation for management studies and science studies to combine to understand science and technology better (1) there has been very little collaboration or cross fertilization between these two areas of social science in the past two decades. Studies of the working practices of professional, academic scientists are rare, despite the importance of these workers in the knowledge economy, and there is little understanding of the relationship between HR practices, labour process and scientific knowledge production and reproduction.

This project will use a management studies perspective to consider a contemporary ‘crisis’ in formal science. The crisis of reproducibility – the inability for one research team to replicate the results obtained by another research team – has received considerable attention in the scientific press in recent years (2, 3). A recent survey in Nature found that 50% of scientists have failed to reproduce one of their own experiments (4).

This problem threatens to undermine public confidence in scientific expertise and opinion, a very major problem given the legitimised discourse of climate change denial (5). The project will investigate the management of scientists involved in knowledge production work, and will examine the labour process surrounding knowledge production (6, 7). It will consider whether it is constraints of work, managerial and institutional imperatives (8), an instrumental orientation to career (9), and a ‘publish or perish’ culture (10) that are barriers to replication and factors in low reproducibility rates.

This research will address these issues from a combined management studies and sociology of work perspective. In particular the research will consider the relationship between the construction of occupational identities, managerial control of work time and the decision making processes that take place inside work teams regarding identification of experiments to replicated and / or reproduced (10). The project will adopt a qualitative approach, including semi-structured interviews and an ethnography, and documentary analysis deployed across a range of disciplines and trans-disciplines.

Research questions

1. How is the academic science labour process organised, managed and resisted?

2. How do teams of scientists in different disciplines decide on replication experiments and how is this work allocated?

3. What is the role of reproducibility/ replication in the formation of occupational identities by academic scientists?

References

1. Wajcman, J. (2006) 'New connections: social studies of science and technology and studies of work', Work, Employment and Society, 20, 4, 773-786. 2. Harris, R. (2017) Rigor Mortis. How sloppy science, worthless cures, crushes hope and wastes billions, New York: Basic Books. 3. Freedman, L.P., et al (2015) 'The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research', PLoS Biol, 13, 6. 4. Baker, M. (2016) ‘Is there a reproducibility crisis? Nature 533, 452–454 (26 May 2016)  5. Makri, A. (2017) ‘Give the public the tools to trust scientists’ Nature 541, 261 (19 January 2017)  6. Thompson, P. (1983) The Nature of Work.  An introduction to debates on the labour process, London: Macmillan. 7. Thompson, P. and Ackroyd, P. (1995) 'All quiet on the workplace front?', Sociology, 29, 4, 615-633. 8. Bradley, H., Erickson, M., Stephenson, C. and Williams, S. (2000) Myths at work, Cambridge: Polity.  9. Erickson, M., Bradley, H., Stephenson, C. and Williams, S. (2009) Business in society: people, work and organizations, Cambridge: Polity 10. Erickson, M. (2015) Science, culture and society: understanding science in the twenty-first century. 2nd edition, Cambridge: Polity.

Profile photo for Dr Peter Hemming

Dr Peter Hemming

Peter is interested in supervising PhD and EdD students on a broad range of topics in the fields of sociology of education, childhood/youth and religion. He has particular expertise in the following areas:

  • Religion/spirtuality and education (including faith schools, collective worship and mindfulness)
  • Children's and young people's (non-) religious lives and identities
  • Schools, citizenship and diversity (in relation to religion or more broadly)

If you are interested in undertaking doctoral study with Peter, please feel free to get in touch, preferably with a CV and a 1-2 page proposal outlining your ideas.

Peter has previously supervised the following doctoral candidates to successful completion, and has contributed to a range of other supervisory teams:

  • Amber Fensham-Smith: Online networks in home schooling (2012-17)
  • Elena Hailwood: Mindfulness in schools (2016-20)

He has examined a number of doctoral theses, including in an internal and external capacity.

Profile photo for Prof Andrew Hobson

Prof Andrew Hobson

Andy is interested to work with applicants seeking to conduct research relating to the professional learning, development and/or well-being of teachers and other professionals. Specific foci include but are not restricted to studies of:

  • Teachers’ early professional learning
  • Teacher well-being
  • Mentoring for early career teachers / professionals
  • Mentoring across professions
  • Judgementoring
  • ONSIDE Mentoring
Profile photo for Dr Rachel Marks

Dr Rachel Marks

My supervisory interests include teaching and learning in primary schools, particularly in primary and early years mathematics. I am also interested in the social context of schooling, policy and assessment, including interests related to ability-grouping and equity issues. I am interested in supervising projects involving mixed methods approaches as well as large-scale literature reviews including meta-analyses.

Profile photo for Dr Rachel Masika

Dr Rachel Masika

Rachel is currently on the supervision team for Joe Waghorne on his thesis, 'Postgraduate research in professional practice: processes, challenges, supervision, support, and success'.  She is interested in supervising projects on:

  • Higher education pedagogies and policy
  • Equity and inclusivity in higher education
  • Widening participation in higher education
  • Higher education students' transitions and experience
  • Higher education student learning and teaching
  • Higher education pedagogic research development
Profile photo for Dr Jools Page

Dr Jools Page

I am working with PhD and EdD students within the field of Early Years and I welcome enquiries from prospective candidates who are interested in my specific areas of specialism which include:

  • 'Professional Love'
  • Infants, toddlers & children under 3 years of age
  • Attachment based relationships -  Love, Care and Intimacy
  • Theory, policy and practices with infants and toddlers
  • Quality and learning/ policy, practice and pedagogy
  • The Rights of babies and young children
  • Professional adult roles – e.g primary caregiving/key person approach
  • Parent roles

I have supervised seven students to successful completion of their doctorates and examined 17 full doctoral theses.

For further supervisory staff including cross-disciplinary options, please visit research staff on our research website.

Making an application

The normal entry requirements for the EdD (Professional Doctorate) are:

  • a qualification, normally at Masters level in a relevant subject or appropriate research experience. An application made by someone with research experience but with no Masters level qualification will be considered on its merits and will normally require independent academic references.
  • at least four years of appropriate professional experiences.

You will initially make your application for the MRes Education and take this qualification before moving to EdD.

You will apply to the University of Brighton through our online application portal. When you do, you will require a research proposal, references, a personal statement and a record of your education.

You will be asked whether you have discussed your research proposal and your suitability for doctoral study with a member of the University of Brighton staff. We recommend that all applications are made with the collaboration of at least one potential supervisor. Approaches to potential supervisors can be made directly through the details available online. If you are unsure, please do contact the Doctoral College for advice.

Please visit our How to apply for a PhD page for detailed information.

Sign in to our online application portal to begin.

 

Fees and funding

Funding

Undertaking research study will require university fees as well as support for your research activities and plans for subsistance during full or part-time study.

Funding sources include self-funding, funding by an employer or industrial partners; there are competitive funding opportunities available in most disciplines through, for example, our own university studentships or national (UK) research councils. International students may have options from either their home-based research funding organisations or may be eligible for some UK funds.

Learn more about the funding opportunities available to you.

Tuition fees academic year 2020–21

Standard fees are listed below, but may vary depending on subject area. Some subject areas may charge bench fees/consumables; this will be decided as part of any offer made. Fees for UK/EU and international students on full-time and part-time courses are likely to incur a small inflation rise each year of a research programme.

MPhil/PhD
 Full-timePart-time

UK/EU 

£4,407 

£2,204 

International  

£14,976 

£7,488

International students registered in the School of Humanities or in the Brighton Business School

£13,194 

£6,597

Professional doctorate
Full-timePart-time

N/A

£2,673 (UK/EU)

PhD by Publication
Full-time Part-time
 N/A  £2,204(UK/EU)

Contact Brighton Doctoral College

To contact the Doctoral College at the University of Brighton we request an email in the first instance. Please visit our contact the Brighton Doctoral College page.

For supervisory contact, please see individual profile pages.

Back to top
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • TikTok
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn icon

Contact us

University of Brighton
Mithras House
Lewes Road
Brighton
BN2 4AT

Main switchboard 01273 600900

Course enquiries

Sign up for updates

University contacts

Report a problem with this page

Quick links

  • Courses
  • Open days
  • Order a prospectus
  • Academic departments
  • Academic staff
  • Professional services departments
  • Jobs
  • Privacy and cookie policy
  • Accessibility statement
  • Libraries
  • Term dates
  • Maps
  • Graduation
  • Site information
  • Online shop
  • COVID-19

Information for

  • Current students
  • International students
  • Media/press
  • Careers advisers/teachers
  • Parents/carers
  • Business/employers
  • Alumni/supporters
  • Suppliers
  • Local residents