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InFrame at SERA 2025

University of Aberdeen

19th to 21st November 2025

Written by Zain Ul Abidin, InFrame Community Knowledge Analyst, University of Glasgow

 

The InFrame team attended the Scottish Educational Research Association Conference 2025 in Aberdeen, engaging with a wide range of discussions on education, leadership, policy, and practice. Across keynotes and parallel sessions, contributors explored how values such as trust, responsibility, belonging, and professional autonomy are shaped through everyday systems and decisions. Several sessions surfaced the long-term cultural foundations that sit beneath educational practice, highlighting how ideas about work, vocation, authority, and care continue to influence how learning environments function today. Other discussions examined how emerging tools, including generative artificial intelligence, are raising new questions about assessment, integrity, and institutional responsibility.

 

Group of speakers standing at the front of a conference room following a presentation on improving education through research and collegiality. A projected slide behind them references visible and underlying factors that support learning success, with the setting reflecting formal knowledge exchange and collaboration in higher education.

 

Within this broader landscape, InFrame shared work that offered a complementary perspective on leadership and culture. A paper presented by Zain Ul Abidin and Charlotte Bonner-Evans examined collegial leadership and the often hidden or invisible labour that supports participation, confidence, and success within research funding processes. Positioned alongside conversations on policy, professional practice, and inclusion, the discussion opened space to consider how relational work, informal support, and networks of care operate across educational and research settings. Participation in SERA provided a valuable opportunity to connect InFrame’s work with wider debates, exchange perspectives across sectors, and carry new insights back into ongoing activity across the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and St Andrews.


First published: 8 January 2026