I am Head of Primary Programmes and Principal Lecturer in Initial Teacher Education at Liverpool John Moores University. Prior to this, I have worked in higher education and primary schools in Liverpool and Manchester for nearly 20 years. My main research interests include school-community relations, Primary English teaching and professional intellectual leadership. I am currently working on the ‘Writing Over Time’ research project in collaboration with The University of Liverpool. This research is about writing, children and Liverpool.

It explores whether (and how) writing produced by children may have changed across time (before and after the implementation of the National Curriculum). Our interest is both linguistic and educational: we are not only passionate about language (and language change) but also about translating research into tangible outcomes for the benefit of the wider educational community. The research takes a comparative, corpus-based approach using the APU archive, the largest historical archive of children’s reading, speech and writing. The APU Corpus 1979–1988 is a diachronic corpus of children’s data at from Years 6 and 9. The materials are based on a sample of the Language Performance Surveys carried out from 1979 to 1988 by the Assessment of Performance Unit (APU), UK National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER).