My research interests are special educational needs, inclusive education, teacher education for inclusion, autism education, and educational technology for children with special needs. I am interested to hear from international academic colleagues and potential doctoral students who wish to work in these areas.

One strand of my work focuses on how teachers conceptualize their practice in relation to working with children with special educational needs (SEN), theoretical debates on inclusion and special education, and teacher education for inclusion. I am particularly interested in how knowledge derived from psychology and related domains can be considered and is relevant for the work of teachers working with children with SEN and how such knowledge can (or cannot) be used to inform practice. 

Funding for this work has included a 2013-2015 UK Department of Education grant considering best practice approaches for the training of beginning teachers in relation to special educational needs, and 3 year (2015-2019) longitudinal research project on teacher education and inclusion for the National Council for Special Educational Needs of the Republic of Ireland.

I am also interested in the use of educational technology with children with special educational needs. In the EU FP7 HANDS project, I was involved in the development of mobile technology to foster social and life skill functioning in children with autism. I also led an IOE seed funded exploration of how AI approaches can be used to inform decision making in autism education, in conjunction with UCL Computer Science. I  am currently working on a technology based project using a learning outcomes approach to support effective differentiation for children with special educational needs funded by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (2022-2024). Since 2022 I have been Editor in Chief of Computers in the Schools, a Taylor and Francis journal.

I also have a track record in knowledge exchange, and have worked closely with a number of commercial, governmental and third sector organisations on development and evaluation projects. I was Co-Investigator on a project funded by the DIT and DfE evaluating teacher and school leader professional development in Saudi Arabia (2020-2021). On secondment to Ofsted in 2022-2023 I led on national projects on careers guidance in schools and colleges, including a specific project focusing on careers guidance in special schools, pupil referral units and specialist FE colleges.

I also write about antisemitism in higher and K-12 education from my perspective as a Jewish academic and Zionist. See a list of publications here