Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) is pleased to announce that its annual research conference will be held as an in-person event in The Gibson Hotel, Dublin 1 on November 4th, 2025. The conference is an important forum for sharing new research based on the GUI datasets with policy makers, fellow researchers and other stakeholders.
The GUI team are delighted to announce that our keynote speaker for the 2025 conference will be Dr James Hall from the University of Southampton. Dr Hall will present a talk on, “Mind the gap: Towards a better understanding of how structural inequalities are related to Early Childhood Education and implications for longitudinal research”
Dr James Hall is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Southampton and Deputy Director of the UK’s National Centre for Research Methods. He also leads the Quantitative Methods in Education group at the Southampton Education School.
His research focuses on early child development and Early Childhood Education (ECE), with particular interest in how parents and preschools jointly shape children’s development and educational outcomes. His work aims to inform the design of high-quality early interventions and evidence-based policy.
Dr Hall adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on education, psychology, and health, and has contributed to major UK studies including the Effective Provision of Preschool Education (EPPE) and the national evaluation of Children’s Centres in England (ECCE). He served as an advisor on ECE for Ofsted, the education standards body in England, between 2018 and 2023, contributing to national guidance on quality and pedagogy.
He also continues to advance methodological innovation in the study of child development. His recent work includes airbag moderation, a conceptual framework for understanding situations in which structurally shaped factors, such as ECE quality, are both influenced by social disadvantage and modify its effects on children’s outcomes. The framework addresses limitations in traditional moderation frameworks by recognising that many protective factors are themselves unequally distributed, offering a more realistic basis for studying how early interventions interact with patterns of social inequality.
Call for Abstracts 2025
The call for abstracts is now closed
Conference Archive
Details of previous conferences are available using the links below:
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2024
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2023
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2022
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2021
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2020
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2019
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2018
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2017
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2016
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2015
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2014
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2013
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2012
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2011
Growing Up in Ireland Annual Conference 2010
