Educational research

I am delighted to have a chapter in Chris Brown and Graham Handscomb’s new book, The Ideas-Informed Society: Why We Need It and How to Make It Happen, published by Emerald Publishing. My chapter is called ‘A little conceptual housekeeping: ideas and their contexts’ and sets out some ways in which we might think about what ideas are, and are for.

I have worked all my life in education, as teacher, researcher, policy adviser and independent consultant. I am an experienced evaluator, writer and presenter. I have an international profile in educational research and evaluation; I currently hold a Visiting Professorship at the Institute of Education, London. Previously, I was a Visiting Professor at Newman University, Birmingham, and an Honorary Research Fellow at Oxford University Department of Education.

My professorial lecture, given in 2004, was called ‘Grounding the Democratic Imagination:  Developing the Relationship between Research and Policy in Education’.

In my role as Visiting Professor at Newman University, Birmingham, I helped to organise a conference called ‘Troubling Research: Liminal Spaces, Methodological Challenges, Innovative Approaches’ on 7th and 8th July 2016: Troubling_Research.pdf

affiliations

  • Visiting Professor, London Centre for Educational Leadership, UCL Institute of Education, London
  • Honorary Fellow, The Chartered College of Teaching

full-time posts

  • Senior Policy Adviser for Research, General Teaching Council for England (GTC), 2000 – 2008
  • Principal Research Officer, National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) and Head of the NFER’s School Improvement Research Centre, 1987 – 2000

research expertise and interests

  • evaluations of national and local educational initiatives and funded programmes – for example, I was commissioned to undertake evaluations of the inclusive education projects managed by Save the Children in Kosovo.  It was a real privilege to visit the schools and talk to the children, their teachers and parents, education officials and members of the community, and to see how the country is trying to create a better and more peaceful future through the education of its youngest citizens
  • support for early career researchers – including a suite of resources on Commissioning and Consuming Research, available on the British Educational Research Association website
  • teachers’ professionalism; professional learning and development; the deeper conceptualisation of teaching as a research-informed profession with a particular focus on pedagogy
  • research-informed policy-making in education
  • the collection, interpretation and use of different kinds of data for school self-evaluation and school development; in particular, constructing and understanding statistical ‘value added’ measures of performance
  • national programme evaluations, using a variety of approaches; international perspectives on ‘school improvement’ and ‘teacher effectiveness’, including work for British Council and a placement at the World Bank
  • uses of creativity and the imagination in research and in teaching

Please contact me at lesley@lesleysaunders.org.uk if you would like to explore possible commissions or collaborations

qualifications

MA in classics (University of Cambridge)

Postgraduate certificate of education (University of Oxford), with Distinction

DPhil (University of Oxford)