I am a Senior Research Fellow at UCL Institute of Education. My work focuses on education policy and governance, particularly how institutions frame problems, set priorities, allocate resources, and structure accountability within political and historical contexts. Alongside this, I develop and apply computational tools to analyse how these processes play out in policy discourse, including my current project, EduAtlas, an end-to-end NLP system examining education policy across England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
Over fifteen years I have worked across the UK's four nations (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), Ireland, Ethiopia, and Vietnam, from individual schools and communities through to ministers, donors, and national policy systems. This experience has shown me how the same policy challenge looks entirely different depending on institutional architecture, political history, and resource constraints, and why that matters when designing reforms intended to operate across contexts.
I work at the intersection of research and policy, contributing to system reform agendas for governments and global donors. My policy landscape mapping across the UK's four nations is cited in the OECD's 2025 report on knowledge mobilisation in education. My work has informed national COVID-19 responses and influenced reforms supported by partners including the World Bank and FCDO. Alongside this, I have developed and validated large-scale measurement instruments across multiple country contexts, building a practical understanding of what is lost when complex human concepts are operationalised at scale.
As AI becomes embedded in public institutions, these long-standing governance questions take new technical form. Categories once embedded in policy frameworks and administrative routines are increasingly translated into data and code. My work increasingly focuses on how these systems intersect with institutional decision-making, and how they can be designed and governed in ways that strengthen, rather than quietly reshape, accountability and public purpose.