Professor Chris Downey PhD, BSc, MA, MSc, PGCE, PGCTLHE
Associate Professor
Professor Chris Downey is Senior Lecturer within Southampton Education School at the University of Southampton.
Chris is a Senior Lecturer in Education and member of the Leadership, School Improvement and Effectiveness Research Centre (LSIE). His research interests are currently focused in the allied fields of educational improvement and effectiveness, especially in how effectiveness data can be utilised to both inform and evaluate educational improvement from Early Years through to Higher Education.
Chris is member of the International Congress for School Improvement and Effectiveness (ICSEI) and currently serves as on the ICSEI Board. He is also a member of two ICSEI Networks:
- Methods of Research in Effectiveness (MORE) which seeks to promote the use of innovative and high quality methods in Educational Effectiveness research, and
- the Data Use Network which is a group of researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in researching teachers' use of a wide range of data in their professional practice.
After graduating with Honours in Chemistry from the University of London Chris worked for ICI Agrochemicals as a Metabolism Chemist before training as a secondary science teacher at the University of Southampton. Chris developed a passion for education through twelve years teaching science at secondary schools in Hampshire and Poole. During this time he gained experience of school leadership as a Head of Department and as an Assistant Headteacher. From 2004 he worked with a team involved in setting up a consortium of schools to offer School-centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) and was responsible for the design and teaching of the partnership's Secondary Science PGCE course.
In 2006 Chris took up a two-year post as Researcher in Residence with a Local Authority School Improvement Service as part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project set up in collaboration with the Southampton Education School here at the University of Southampton. The project was focused on the use of data in the context of Every Child Matters.