I am a Senior Lecturer in Education in the School of Education and member of the Centre for Multilevel Modelling (CMM), University of Bristol. Before I joined the University of Bristol, I was a Lecturer in Education at the University of Exeter and Lecturer in Quantitative Social Sciences (Q-Step) at the University of Glasgow. I did my PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim.

My research interests revolve around social inequalities in education and focus on the relationship between social class background and children’s educational trajectories, school outcomes, and cognitive and socio-emotional development. I also study how social class, parental education and other parental resources and skills influence their parenting values, beliefs and the ways in which they get involved in their children’s education. I am also interested in social class, gender and ethnic biases in teacher judgements of student abilities, and teachers’ decisions including school track recommendations and ability grouping. Currently I am principle investigator on an ESRC funded project on social and ethnic biases in teacher assessments of the school performance of primary school students in England, Scotland, Germany and Ireland.

Another area of research I am currently conducting work in is discrimination and prejudice against children. 

In my research I mainly conduct statistical analyses of large-scale survey data such as national cohort studies. I have worked with longitudinal data sets including the Millennium Cohort Study, 1970 British Cohort Study, Growing Up In Scotland, French panels of secondary school students (Panel d’élèves du second degré), German Socioeconomic Panel and German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS).