IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, has granted West Herts College Group Chair, Dr Tony Breslin, an Honorary Professorship with the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research (CTTR).
In this voluntary role, Professor Breslin will bring to CTTR a range of experience gained across the fields of school improvement, educational governance and curriculum reform. In particular, he plans to work with colleagues to develop an emergent body of research advocating a new language for school and college improvement. As an Honorary Professor, he will also contribute to the Centre’s work through giving lectures, hosting seminars, playing a part in a range of existing CTTR research projects and supporting the dissemination of findings from these projects. In doing so, he will draw on his ongoing work in schools, colleges, and other educational and training settings, settings in which he is to be found on at least a weekly basis.
Professor Breslin began his career as a teacher of Sociology in Hertfordshire. He subsequently taught and held leadership and advisory roles in Haringey and Enfield before completing his Doctorate at the IOE. This focused on how teachers and educational leaders manage and mediate policy change. He credits his experience as an early recruit to the IOE EdD programme as having a profound impact on his thinking and practice.
Throughout his career, he has taken a particular interest in Citizenship Education and the wider social curriculum, widening participation, professional and vocational education, 14-19 curriculum reform, lifelong learning and educational governance. He is a former CEO at the Citizenship Foundation, the education and participation charity that now trades as Young Citizens, where he developed the concept of the Citizenship-rich school. He has also served as a Chief Examiner at GCSE and a Principal Examiner at A level.
Prior to taking up the role of Chair at West Herts College Group in September 2024, Tony served as the founding Chair of Pathways for All, a county-wide initiative which oversees post-16 education and training across Kent. He is also a Trustee of Agora Learning Partnership, a Hertfordshire-based, primary-focused multi-academy trust, and was formerly Chair at Bushey Primary Education Federation and a Trustee at Anthem Schools Trust. Professor Breslin has also served as Chair of the Association for the Teaching of the Social Sciences and as a Trustee at the Association for Citizenship Teaching and Adoption UK.
His books, Lessons from Lockdown (Routledge, 2021) and Bubble Schools (Routledge, 2023) chronicle the experiences of teachers, learners and school leaders during the multiple local and national lockdowns of the early 2020s. His reports, A Place for Learning (RSA, 2016), and Who Governs Our Schools? (RSA, 2017), have made important contributions to the debates about the role of adult and community learning, FE and HE in a post-industrial age, and the nature of school governance in an emergent landscape of academies, federations and trusts.
More recently, he has published an educational history of the past decade for the British Educational Research Association, to mark the organisation’s fiftieth anniversary (BERA, 2024). This builds on an earlier set of papers, for each of BERA’s first four decades, published collectively as 40@40: a portrait of 40 years of educational research through forty studies, in 2014.
