A new educational neuroscience policy research centre has been announced by two British universities, after being funded with £3 million by the Department for Education. Plans for the new centre state that the DfE expects it to synthesize knowledge and expertise in order to inform educational policy and practice in England. The contract to lead the centre was announced by UCL and Birkbeck at the end of May 2026, building on an existing Centre for Educational Neuroscience that scientists from the two institutions have sustained for 18 years.

Little has been publicly announced about the Educational Neuroscience Policy Research Centre and its agenda. However, it is possible to anticipate its main lines of work from the named scientific staff who will people it. In this post I have scanned the recent projects and publications of all 14 named academic staff, identifying their main areas of expertise, read their LinkedIn posts announcing its launch, and collected press releases about the centre launch from participating institutions. It gives us a partial glimpse of how the centre is intended to operate and its likely focal concerns over the initial two-year period of the contract. [UPDATE: a new ENPRC website has been published with further information about its aims and research strands.]

Documenting and understanding the work of this centre is significant because it represents a concerted effort to embed the neural and cognitive sciences in national educational policy. It makes neuroscience the most authoritative source for science-based decision-making in the sector. This is despite a very long history of controversy over the relevance of brain science as a source of policy knowledge, concerns that it centres biological explanations for educational problems, and growing international concern about the development and use of “neurotechnologies” for gathering data from the brain.

In our recent work on the rise of the bio-edu-data sciences funded by the Leverhulme Trust, we have already explored how educational neuroscience has framed its neurotechnological research into the “learning brain” in terms of its policy relevance, and investigated the various translational efforts that have been made in recent years to embed neuro-expertise into educational practice. The present post is primarily a preliminary survey of the centre’s staff and research interests, as a way of outlining some ideas for an ongoing research agenda tracing the interactions of biology and policy in the UK, at a time of growing international education policy interest in the life sciences.

The point of such research is not to criticize educational neuroscience as an academic enterprise. Rather it is to develop a better social scientific understanding of the emerging and evolving relations between science, technology, and policy in education. In some respects it is encouraging that the government education department has given such a platform to academic research. At the same time, it is clear that a governmental focus on educational neuroscience represents a very selective approach to being science-informed. It also gives the selected scientists involved in the centre a very privileged role to translate their research directly into policy and practice. For those reasons, it seems reasonable to suggest the need for some social scientific analysis of these scientific actors, their practices of knowledge production, and their newfound power and influence in the education sector.

Neuro-education science-policy networking

For the last thirty years, neuroscience has repeatedly been promoted as the scientific basis for improving teaching and optimizing children’s learning outcomes. For much of that time, educational brain science has appeared “premature” as a source of policy advice or practice intervention. Brain science has also often been selectively and reductively appropriated by a commercial industry as the basis for pseudo-neuroscientific brain-based teaching products.

As a result, educational neuroscientists have had to fight for legitimacy and acceptance as a field over three decades. They have done so often by declaiming the brain-based industry, and by competing with established scientific fields—especially psychological sciences—in educational research. It is through such contests, as well as the establishment of scientific associations, conferences and journals, that educational neuroscience has consolidated and made claims to being a novel academic “field” with its own distinctive research agenda, knowledge, and claims to policy relevance.

The DfE educational neuroscience centre is clearly intended to signal that educational neuroscience is no longer premature but a fully developed field with a powerful knowledge base and the scientific authority to act as a key source of policy and practice intervention. A significant part of that authority derives from its composition as a network of established academic scientists with senior leadership positions in the field of educational neuroscience and allied disciplinary areas, many with long-established labs and well-developed relationships in the field.

It is constituted as a multi-institutional consortium, with five members from UCL, two from Birkbeck, and one each from universities of Bristol, Cambridge, East Anglia, East London, Oxford, and Surrey. The original tender for the Centre was issued in late 2025. This was around the same time the DfE announced Michael Thomas from Birkbeck as its incoming Chief Scientific Advisor. A Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Thomas was the director of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience at Birkbeck/UCL until 2025, when Jo Van Herwegen (UCL) and Denis Mareschal (Birkbeck) assumed co-directorship. Van Herwegen and Mareschal are also the named leads of the DfE centre, which is to be developed on top of the existing collaborative arrangement.

Before taking up the DfE Chief Scientific Advisor position, Thomas worked and published with many members of the new centre directly, including publications with both of its co-directors. As such, although Thomas is not formally named as a consortium member, I include him in my initial analysis as clearly a major source of scientific leadership and policy influence. As probably the educational researcher with the most powerful position in the UK after taking up the Chief Scientific Advisor role in 2026, he has played a significant role in brokering a major new role for neuroscience expertise in English education policy.

A 2024 paper lead-authored by Thomas, along with another consortium member, surveyed the “state of play” of interaction between education, policy and neuroscience in the UK. They argued that educational neuroscience should be “viewed as a Research and Development (R&D) wing of education,” and called for “investment in infrastructure for translation” in order to support “implementation of educational neuroscience insights in the classroom.” The article set out a vision for educational neuroscience that reads as a blueprint for the centre now funded by the DfE.

The centre is intended to function as a translational infrastructure that functions by bringing together scientific expertise. “This is an opportunity to bring together experts within the field, to synthesise the knowledge we’ve got and bring it out, with a direct route to policy and practice,” as its UCL co-director Van Herwegen put it in the launch press release. “This new centre will act as a bridge between cognitive neuroscientists, educational practitioners, and policymakers – to directly inform policy and practice,” the Birkbeck co-director Mareschal added. Here we see both an emphasis on synthesizing evidence and synthesizing expertise, creating connections and directly routing scientific expertise into policy and practice deliberations.

We can understand the centre, then, both as a kind of policy-science network and a knowledge infrastructure for advancing educational neuroscience as a field of policy advice and as the scientific basis for practice intervention. As a network that criss-crosses policy concerns and scientific interests, it consists of social relations across eight institutions, formalizing even further an existing collaboration with an 18 year history. Here, a history of sedimented social and institutional relations has consolidated into a position of authority for the affiliated scientists, who are now positioned as policy advisors with expertise in producing and synthesizing evidence for direct translation into practice.

Understood as a knowledge infrastructure, its purpose is to construct systems for evidence synthesis and scientific communication to both policy officials and teaching professionals. It has highly influential support from the Chief Scientific Advisor for education, who shares direct professional relations and collaborations with consortium members, and who has advanced its original vision as a new kind of scientific knowledge broker in the education sector. In further work I hope to tease out these social relations and map the sociotechnical knowledge infrastructure of the centre, in order to better understand its composition and operations.

Neuro knowledge and expertise

The term “educational neuroscience” glosses over considerable diversity in the disciplinary orientations and expertise of the consortium participants who populate the new centre. The range of job titles include Professor of Developmental Psychology, Professor of Psychology, Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Professor of Neuroscience and Education, Professor of Artificial Intelligence in Education, plus Reader in Human Genetics and Research Fellow in Social Science Genetics. Many of them lead other centres, institutes or labs. These include the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, the Developmental Dynamics Laboratory, the Institute for the Science of Early Years, the Cognition, Genes and Developmental Variability Lab, and the Mind, Action & Development in the Environment Lab. As such, the disciplinary expertise of the centre includes an array of neural, psychological, developmental, cognitive, and social and behavioural genetic sciences.

The inclusion of participants with expertise in behavioural genetics and social science genomics might seem surprising given the controversies surrounding scientific claims of the genetic bases of educational outcomes. However, an interest in the genetic correlates of brain development, particularly in the early years, is considered an important area of research in educational neuroscience. Two centre participants co-authored a 2015 paper titled “What Can the Study of Genetics Offer to Educators?”, addressing “the key question of what genetic data imply about the ability of educators to optimize educational outcomes for children across the range of abilities.”

One of them later ran a research program for the Nuffield Council on Bioethics focused on the “insights, opportunities and challenges” of educational genomics. Another authored the paper “Implications of the genomic revolution for education research and policy” asserting the significance of educational genomics research for educational policy and practice, and has also contributed to research focusing on students’ “genetic predispositions” for educational attainment. Insights from educational genomics (contested and controversial as the science may be) are therefore very much in the purview of the educational neuroscience centre. 

Given the range of disciplinary expertise, the core topics of interest across the consortium are also quite varied. From a scan of recent publications—and this is only a scan rather than a depth read, especially as some of these individuals are authors on hundreds of papers—a few key topics stand out. They include early years cognitive development and special educational needs in particular, with reading difficulties such as dyslexia and the development of mathematical skills other notable areas of investigation. Some members are interested in the neural bases of attention and ADHD, others in foundational neuroscience topics such as executive function and working memory. The genetic aspects of educational achievement and learning difficulties are another area of concern. This range of topics of investigation indicates that educational neuroscience is involved in multiple efforts to study, conceptualize and explain what is often termed the “learning brain,” including its developmental, cognitive and genetic aspects.

More generally, many members share interests in the neural and biological factors involved in social inequalities and social mobility. Indeed, as we argued in a recent paper, educational neuroscience has tended to adopt an “emancipatory” discourse that insights into the brain can be used to address social barriers, tackle systemic inequities, empower children, and create technological opportunities for overcoming socioeconomic and health-related barriers. [UPDATE: the new ENPRC website announces 5 research strands: SEND, early years, AI, workforce development, and genetics and education.]

However, these claims to authority and expertise are also the subject of some critique. For example, persistent critiques of educational neuroscience have questioned brain-centred interpretations of educational achievement, because of their tendency to downplay the role of social contexts and constraints, or to reframe these contexts in the terms of acquired characteristics in students’ brains.  The emancipatory discourse in much recent educational neuroscience is typically tied to projects focused on using neuroscience and neurotechnology to help socially disadvantaged students individually strengthen their skills in subjects like maths and science, rather than help support their communities to demand social justice and equity of access to education.

Nonetheless, the establishment of the centre clearly indicates that such critiques have not affected the efforts of educational neuroscience to position itself as a policy-relevant field. One key part of this positioning is the recent development of neurotechnologies, which have allowed educational neuroscientists to renew their claims of the maturity and relevance of the field for both policymaking and pedagogic practice in classrooms.

Neurotechnologies and methods

Educational neuroscience bases a significant portion of its claims to relevance on its deployment of neurotechnologies. Neurotechnologies are devices and software that can detect brain structure, mechanisms and functions. They range from invasive devices that have to be surgically implanted into the brain, to wearable and portable devices that can be used “out of the box” in scientific studies, or even purchased for consumer use.

Two leading figures associated with the new educational neuroscience centre previously edited a special issue on the topic “Neurotechnology in the classroom: Current research and future potential.” They claimed that emerging neurotechnologies can provide “new opportunities for educational research in cognitively diverse environments,” in particular because it is “now possible to examine mechanisms, processes and learner-teacher interactions in the natural context of the classroom through the use of different portable neurotechnologies.”

It has therefore been argued by its advocates that educational neuroscience has been liberated from the lab, with its fixed instruments and simulated tasks, to conduct authentic or ecologically valid studies in real-world classroom contexts. The authors of the special issue editorial add that neurotechnologies can also be used directly by teachers in classroom settings to generate “real-time information to guide practices, either on the current state of their students or the effectiveness of the teachers’ current activities.”

The most common kind of neurotechnologies are those used to brain scanning and neuro-imaging. In educational neuroscience, scientists use varied neuro measurement instruments, including electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIR) to generate brain data pertaining to the neural substrates of learning, cognition and other educational outcomes. Such methods appear to make learning and cognition visualizable at a neuromolecular level, particularly as measurable changes in brain structure, brain activity and activation signals, and brainwave recordings.

Others use computational modelling and neurocomputational methods. Since the brain is extremely complex, neurocomputation is taken to be an appropriate methodology for modelling and simulating its structural and functional dynamics. Neurocomputation involves the use of artificial neural networks to informationalize and model education-relevant cognitive abilities including the development of reading, numerical cognition, executive function, and reward-based behaviours. Neurocomputation is therefore a highly data- and computationally-intensive approach to modelling and simulating the learning brain, which also blurs the distinction between human and artificial neural networks and assumes a shared vocabulary for explaining the workings of the brain and computing.

Neurotechnologies can also be designed as interventionist devices. This includes neuro-stimulation devices—such as to prompt increased attention or activate brain regions associated with learning. Brain-computer interfaces have also been designed that can track brain activity in real-time and then deliver “neurofeedback” to the user. In education this could include generating feedback for the use of the teacher, or even students receiving BCI neurofeedback on their levels of concentration, focus and cognitive “fitness.”

For scientists involved in measuring the genetic contribution to educational outcomes and attainment, additional technologies and methods such as genome-wide association studies and polygenic scoring may also be used. These genomics technologies and methods consist of an assembly of biosensors for the collection of DNA samples, laboratory scanning machines, and advanced bioinformatics software that can process digital data about millions of genetic variants across very large cohort samples.

Claims of the promise of neurotechnologies have also been accompanies by highly promissory claims of their future potential to unlock the biological correlates of learning. One key member has, for example, worked with the UNESCO International Bureau of Education strongly advocating for the transformative role of neuroscience technologies and genetic testing combined in furthering the scientific understanding of learning, and even intervening in it in “personalized” ways:

Our accumulating knowledge of the genetic, brain-based, psychological and environmental factors that predict learning may, one day, allow education to be tailored precisely to an individual’s needs. The technology for this important part of the “big data” revolution is not trivial, requiring improved portable neuroimaging for collecting brain data (e.g., neuroheadsets for EEG monitoring) and real-time processing of the data it produces. Gathering and interpreting an individual’s data may also require some further advances in genetic testing technologies. … Combined with our understanding of cognitive neuroscience, technology is providing new ways to study learning in the brain, helping us identify those in need of extra help and supporting the development of new, scientifically informed technology in the classroom.

The key point to make here is that neurotechnologies function as enabling devices for educational neuroscience. The incorporation of new devices into research setups enables evidence and knowledge to be produced that appears more relevant to educational practice due to its production in authentic settings. Neurotechnologies also promise to make the neural correlates of learning “visible” as high-fidelity neuro-images and diagrams. Some neurotech can also be used pedagogically, for example as real-time data dashboards or BCI-based neurofeedback.

Neurotechnologies therefore have been positioned by educational neuroscience in three ways: as scientific research instrumentation for experimental and investigative use; as pedagogic tools for use in classrooms; and as policy technologies to help derive and deliver interventions. In all three ways, neurotechnologies enable educational neuroscience to influence education at the levels of research, practice and policy. How precisely these neurotechnologies function, and the part they play in shaping neuroscientific knowledge about the learning brain, therefore requires further study and examination.

How exactly do scientists configure these technologies, for example? How do these neurotechnologies converge with or transform existing scientific practices, and impact on prior assumptions and understandings? How does the software and its algorithms function to analyze, visualize and communicate complex brain data? What are the implications of neurotechnologies for interpretation and explanation of the learning brain?

Challenging neuroscientific realism

Whether the new DfE Educational Neuroscience Policy Research Centre makes a significant impact on educational research, policy or practice remains to be seen. However, this initial scan of the existing work of its members indicates that it will be strongly oriented towards building “bridges” between neuroscientific research and classroom practices, based on the synthesis of research findings generated with emerging neurotechnologies. It is intended to exert a profound influence on English education. While it’s certainly welcome to see the DfE centring academic educational research, there are many questions here about why it has invested in educational neuroscience over other forms of disciplinary expertise.

Key topics of the centre, it’s possible to speculate from its participants’ research expertise, will include special educational needs, early years development, and support for foundational literacy and mathematical skills. It may involve original studies in authentic school settings. It will certainly involve significant efforts to build interface mechanisms between scientists and policymakers for knowledge mobilization. The centre is a significant national example of an international trend in the promotion of the policy-relevance of educational neuroscience, notably signified by the increased neuro-centrism of influential organizations such as UNESCO. It will also incorporate developments in educational genomics, based on the assumption that genetic sciences can help explain the learning brain at a molecular grain.

The entire agenda of the centre is based on a fundamental assumption that neuroscientific methods and neurotechnologies can be mobilized to directly access and report the neural structures and functions that are associated with learning, cognition, and educational outcomes. This is a form of “scientific realism” as the philosopher of neuroscience Mazviita Chirimuuta describes it in her book The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience.

Scientific realism “asserts that the best-confirmed theories offer approximately true representation of how things stand in nature,” as if the accomplishment of science is to offer a “true account” of any phenomenon, “purified of any input from human knowers.” The assumption of scientific realism is that science holds up a mirror to nature and receives an accurate image of it. In contrast, Chirimuuta argues that neuroscience proceeds from specific methodological, conceptual and analytical decisions and arrangements that profoundly mediate and shape the results of any investigation. She therefore argues “that the acquisition of scientific knowledge is an active process in which the scientist’s schematization and the work that goes into shaping the material target of research leave an indelible imprint on scientific knowledge.”

Compared to the idea of passively “seeing” nature that underpins scientific realism, Chirimuuta argues science proceeds from actively “touching” things and bringing them under the control of the scientist. Neuroscientific theories, models, methods and technologies are all involved in “touching” the objects of investigation, often by simplifying and reducing them to make them interpretable and explainable. From this perspective, what is known as a “learning brain” in educational neuroscience should be understood as an accomplishment of scientists actively grappling with materials, methods, technologies and concepts rather than a natural biological fact.

As we argued in a previous article on the use of neurotechnologies in educational neuroscience, “the learning brain is rendered malleable through its neuro-informational translation into digital data, open to multiple lines of investigation and interpretation.” The specific ways that studies are set up and enacted, then, impacts on the production of “brain facts” about learning and cognition, which in turn affects how such evidence might then be used to support interventions in policy or practice.

This emphasis on how scientific work “touches” and leaves an imprint on its subject matter is important to consider in relation to the educational neuroscience policy research centre. It implies that any knowledge or evidence promoted by the centre needs to be considered in terms of the social activity, methodological setups, and neurotechnological mediation through which it was produced. Educational neuroscience does not hold up a mirror to the learning brain; it constitutes it as a digitalized, neuro-informational object that can be variously configured by different methodological, conceptual and technological setups.

Another aspect of this is the political ambition of the Department for Education, and the aspirations it has invested in educational neuroscience as a source of educational improvement. To what extent is brain science here connected to wider governmental ambitions to improve population health and economic productivity in a changing economy? These concerns have long animated “neuropolitical” efforts to govern through the brain sciences. It is notable, for example, that the only other research and policy centre the DfE is funding is an Economics of Education Research Centre, which is “focused on developing new evidence on and methodological tools for appraising the value of education and skills policies and the broader social and economic benefits they bring.”

As such, while the new centre will operate as a site for the production of novel policy-relevant evidence syntheses, fresh social scientific research is also required to trace and understand how the neuro knowledge it promotes is socially and technologically produced, how it is translated into practice and policy interventions, and how it serves political objectives both within the education sector and beyond. Its activities, and its impacts, will be important to track and document as the centre seeks to make education in England more brain-based and informed by neuroscientific insights.