History of the British Alliance of Researchers in Dental Education and Scholarship (BARDES)

Friday 16 June 2017 saw 34 like-minded academics and clinicians meet under the leadership of Professor Janice Ellis in Newcastle as an inaugural alliance to discuss issues appertaining to Dental Education Research and its need to be progressed within the United Kingdom (UK) and beyond. This Northern/Celtic Alliance comprising Newcastle, Glasgow and Cardiff Dental schools met to explore familiar challenges, share experiences, learn from each other and to develop research themes and projects to strengthen dental education research within the UK.

Several challenges were raised from holding the meeting where two key questions were posed:

• What are the current and future challenges in conducting dental education research?
• How could a UK wide collaboration overcome these challenges?

Discussions revealed common ground and the desire to progress how collaboration could overcome the challenges. Collaboration was seen as the essential key to creating critical mass that would further dental education research and the group settled on some short-, medium- and long-term goals to progress these objectives.

BARDES was effectively “born” and after further annual joint meetings held in Newcastle and another hosted online in 2021 by Glasgow University overwhelming support was established for growing the society, charity registration was achieved in 2022 and BARDES became “official” with the societies mission statement adopted:

To connect and support dental education researchers and scholars to deliver an evidence base that informs the future delivery of exceptional dental education

With the society aims and objectives being made known to all ...

• Facilitating connectivity of providers of undergraduate and postgraduate dental education programmes in order to identify, enable and enhance delivery of educational research.
• Developing communities of practice with similar areas of interest and expertise.
• Providing opportunity for networking through activities such as conferences and the webpages.
• Providing support for members of the Alliance in the form of;
• access to expertise.
• mentorship.
• academic resources.
• Support the growth of the dental education research discipline through active outreach and the development of early career colleagues