New Professors of Education

The School of Education are pleased to welcome Professor Becky Allen and Professor Peter Clough who have recently joined our research and enterprise team.

Professor Becky Allen

Becky is Chief Analyst and a co-founder of Teacher Tapp, the largest teacher survey and professional development tool in the UK. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Until 2018, she was Professor of Education at UCL Institute of Education and over her academic career she has written extensively on school accountability, admissions, expenditure and teacher careers. An economist by training and former secondary school teacher, she is an expert in the analysis of large datasets. Between 2014 and 2017, Becky was the founding Director of Education Datalab, a non-profit research organisation that has developed a reputation for making complex, quantitative analysis accessible for those involved with running schools. In 2018 she chaired a Government working group to review how data is used in schools. Becky’s recent publications include her superb book on teacher careers, The Teacher Gap, co-authored with Sam Sims and published in 2018.

Professor Peter Clough

Peter first worked as a teacher in a number of mainstream and special schools. He has taught Inclusive Education and Early Childhood Education at the University of Sheffield, served as Professor of Inclusive Education at Queen’s, Belfast and Liverpool Hope Universities, and worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Chester. Committed to interdisciplinary knowledge exchange, Peter draws on a diverse assemblage of disciplines of thought, from theory embedded in pedagogical discourses to conceptual systems rooted in political and moral philosophy, and literary composition. Amongst over 50 publications focusing on social justice – equality, inclusion, difference – in lived education, he has written and edited some 14 books, including the brilliant Narratives and Fictions in Educational Research (2002). His current excitement is a project working with imprisoned fathers and the roles they can play in their young children’s literacy.