Richard Riddell

Personal statement

I have worked in, with and on state schooling for over 40 years. After teaching in comprehensive schools in Oxfordshire and Berkshire, I was an Officer in four LAs (Wiltshire, Nottinghamshire, Avon and the City of Bristol, where I was Director of Education for nearly seven years), a consultant and joint head of education at Amnesty International.

I joined Bath Spa in 2009 to teach on the undergraduate Education Studies programme, which I still do, but also teach on the Master's programme and have three PhD students. I have developed into an Education Policy specialism and led the undergraduate and Master's modules on the same.

Before commencing at Bath Spa, my previous university involvements have been at the University of Cambridge, where I was a Visiting Scholar 2002/3 and at the University of the West of England, where I have been a Visiting Fellow in the School of Education since 2002.

My scholarly and research interests have developed out of my personal and professional passions, from stepping off a teaching practice bus in the early 1970s to catch sight of my first comprehensive school to being a senior LA officer serving deprived schools, children and communities. How can schools get better? How can they improve the outcomes for all children, especially the disadvantaged? And how can schools contribute to making our society a better and more just one?

My academic path - including my teaching - has been shaped by these questions and has guided the preparation and writing of my three books, all published by Trentham Books, now at the UCL Institute of Education Press. My first, "Schools for Our Cities" (2003), explored the possibilities of a more flexible urban pedagogy in contrast to the prescriptions of the time, and examined what happens to schools when national policies such as marketisation meet the social and economic reality of middle class market strategies. My second, "Aspiration, Identity and Self-Belief" (2010), drew on over fifty live interviews and examined the social basis for the development of aspiration and how policy - and schools - can provide working class and more disadvantaged students with the advantages accruing to middle class ones from their place in our social structure.

My third one, "Equity, Trust and the Self-improving Schools System", was published in 2016 and, as the title suggests, considered how the developing schools system, sort of supervised by Regional Schools Commissioners, could reduce the still abysmal inequities of educational outcomes in England. At that time, with the prospect of all schools becoming academies by 2022, and the old system of LA involvement being replaced by a new, I concluded that this was more likely. In 2018, however, with the abandonment of a compulsory requirement on all schools to convert, the lack of any time in the legislative programme for education legislation concerning schools, and the apparent difficulties in implementing free school proposals because of site problems, all suggest that the system will continue to be "hybrid", with many schools, especially primaries, remaining indefinitely as local authority maintained.

My continuing and most recent research - and my recent professional experience as a board member of a Multi-Academy Trust - suggests that the nature of the education "system" or polity of which schools are a part now varies tremendously from place to place, even more so than under previous regimes. And whereas it has been argued that the new and developing system is professionally or headteacher-led, I would now argue that no one now either supervises or leads the developing schools system in England. Governance is neither systematic nor system-wide, except by accident. These findings will see their first outing in a conference paper in 2018.

Whatever the views of current arrangements for governance, it is still the case that, I would argue, the continuing high stakes accountability regime, and periodically increasing expectations of the schools system, are not sustainable in the long term. But evidence gathered by myself and others of developing school to school support (and challenge) should give rise to optimism that we can move towards a system based more on trust - of teachers and schools.

Academic qualifications

• BA Magdalen College, Oxford
• MA As above
• PGCE Madeley College of Education
• MPhil Bulmershe College of Higher Education
• PhD Bath Spa University.

Professional memberships

• British Education Research Association (BERA) since 2002
• British Education, Leadership, Management and Administration Society since 2012
• Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA) since 1999
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) since 2017.