Lorna's main research interest is the secondary English curriculum past and present, with a particular interest in policy in practice, creativity teacher agency. Her latest book, Creativity in the English Curriculum: Historical Perspectives and Future Directions will be published shortly. Her work involves both archival research (exploring English policy documents from 1905 to the present) and discussion with practitioners in the field. She was awarded the NATE Terry Furlonger Award for Research in 2020.

Lorna launched a successful local Teachers as Writers group in 2013 as part of the National Writing Project, which seeks to explore the impact of teachers' writing on their work with children in the classroom, and is co-investigator in a comparative project with colleagues in universities in Australia and Israel. She is also evaluating the new Apprentice of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the perspective of teachers and students who experienced the first two years teaching and learning the qualification.

Lorna is Chair of the Initial Teacher Education working group of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE). She is also, together with local ITE colleagues, currently involved in two projects: one explores the beliefs and practices of new teachers of English in terms of creativity (reprising a 2012 publication, Celebrating Creativity Collaboratively), and the second is a UKLA-funded project on the texts commonly used in KS3 classrooms. 

She is further interested in technology enhanced learning, particularly the contribution that ICT can make to an English classroom. She was Chair of the NATE ICT committee (Sept 2006 - Sept 2009), during which time the Entitlement to ICT in Secondary English was updated, and has worked with NATE and BECTA to produce advisory policy papers. She contributed to the development of Teachit's 'The Training Ground' as a resource for student and newly-qualified English teachers.