My research aims to understand and increase teachers' and students' agency - which I summarise as 'acting in accordance with your values' as a humane response to different people and situations. This work has 3 themes:

Values-led school improvement. People's actions in schools are shaped not only by their personal values, but also by those of their institutions and wider society. Often these come into conflict. When left implicit and unexamined, personal values can be overridden or contradicted without recognition. I have researched the use of values-explicit frameworks - especially the Index for Inclusion - to inform school improvement: holding open a space for leaders, teachers and students to discuss whether and how they put their values into action.

Student leadership. Leadership can be understood as operating within formal roles, or as taking a lead in response to motivating challenges. I have explored the latter through pragmatist and existentialist philosophy, creating a model for developing 'responsible leadership' in teenagers in extracurricular contexts. This, I argue, is at the core of democratic education.

Educational dialogue. Dialogic theory proposes that meanings emerge from the gap that opens up when differing perspectives meet. The attempt to cross that gap to understand another is 'dialogue' - which is distinct from chat, or even instruction. It is an ethical, relational theory of living and learning. With colleagues from around the world I have studied how this is best promoted within and beyond classroom contexts, among students and adults. We have created a coding scheme, SEDA, to categorise and evaluate dialogue in talk.