I am a Senior Lecturer in Economics of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. These pages are intended to supplement my IOE web page, where you can also find up-to-date contact details.
I am based in the Department of Quantitative Social Science. We are a multi-disciplinary department of economists, psychologists, sociologists, statisticians and demographers who all practice applied quantitative research. Not all of us exclusively write about education policy (but I do).
I am interested in schools as institutions and the effect of government policies on their behaviour and performance. Much of my research has analysed the impact of market reforms to schooling in England. I have written about changes in school admissions policies and parental choice of school; school accountability and governance; teacher labour markets; school expenditure; and competition between schools. I specialise in quantitative evaluation methods and tend to use large scale datasets, such as the National Pupil Database and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England.
My current research activities include:
- analysis of the new School Workforce Census to explore expenditure decisions across schools, structures of senior management and variation in teacher tenure profiles
- estimation of the impact of failing an Ofsted inspection on long-run school performance
- an exploration of how to encourage popular schools to expand and improve information in the schooling market
- a study of Brighton and Hove’s radical school admissions reforms that included the first widespread use of random allocation (i.e. a lottery) in England
I am programme leader for the MA/MSc in Economics of Education and supervise dissertations for various masters and PhD students. The students I teach come from a wide variety of academic and professional backgrounds from all over the world. It isn’t essential to have worked in education to take our courses, but most have some experience as a policy-maker or a teacher.
