This has been a year of remarkable growth for Network 6. We received 88 submissions for ECER 2026 — roughly double our usual volume of 40 to 45 — which was the largest proportional increase of any EERA network. For the first time the network ran two parallel tracks throughout the conference week. Much of this growth came from our special call on educational spaces responding to social transformations, initiated by Ulrike Stadler-Altmann and colleagues, which alone accounted for 35 papers, four symposia and an ignite talk. We are grateful to everyone who reviewed this volume of submissions and who stepped in to chair the resulting sessions; the network simply could not have absorbed this growth otherwise.
The year also brought a planned change in the network's leadership. At the network meeting in Tampere, the participants confirmed the co-convenors present and appointed Ulrike Stadler-Altmann as incoming link convenor. She begins a shadowing year now and will take up the role at ECER 2027, when Klaus Rummler's term ends after eight years; he will continue to serve as a co-convenor. We deliberately chose a shadowing arrangement so that the handover is a gradual process rather than a break.
The highlight of the conference itself was watching a genuine thematic strand take shape. Research on physical learning spaces, including work from architecture and spatial design, has been present in our network for some years but scattered across the programme, and colleagues told us they had spent previous conferences moving between rooms and missing papers. This year we were able to group three and four closely related papers into single sessions. One participant, a spatial design researcher, said they had never felt more welcome at a conference whose starting point lies outside their own discipline — which is exactly what we hope an open network can offer.