Professor Viv Ellis is an internationally recognised scholar and senior academic leader in education, with a distinguished record across Australia, the UK, Europe, North America and Asia in a range of universities, new and old. He has held major professorial and executive leadership roles, including Dean and Professor of Education at Monash University; Professor of Educational Leadership and Teacher Development at King’s College London; founding Head of the newly re-formed Department of Education at Brunel University London; and University Lecturer and Fellow in Educational Studies at the University of Oxford. His academic work focuses on teacher development, educational reform, professional learning, cultural-historical theory, and the political economy of education.

His career combines highly successful institutional leadership, research distinction, and public service, including board-level directorships. He has led and contributed to externally funded research and development projects in educational change, including substantial international projects in the SWANA (South-West Asia and North Africa) region and Scandinavia. His publication record includes authored and edited monographs, major edited collections, peer-reviewed journal articles, official reports and professional outputs, with recent work addressing the challenges of innovation in education.

Professor Ellis has extensive experience in all aspects of education leadership, including quality assurance, curriculum and staff development, accreditation and regulatory compliance. He has contributed to strategic reviews, advisory panels and quality assurance processes for universities, governments and professional bodies internationally, including in Finland, Ireland, Norway, Australia, Hong Kong and England. Across his work, he brings a distinctive combination of scholarship, institutional leadership, public service and international collaboration to questions of quality in education, the development of policy, and educational transformation. His career-long focus on the power of high quality, engaging education for individuals, communities, economies and societies stems from his first career as a schoolteacher in one of England’s most economically disadvantaged but culturally rich regions.

‘This  is my personal-professional website and the views expressed are entirely my own. Posts are usually categorised under the following headings: Publications (new books, articles or reports); Events (in which I am participating); Research (new projects or related information); Blog (*very, very* occasional rambles, diatribes, paeans, tributes, laments, wtfs, etc.). I am rarely active on social media but I post occasionally to my Bluesky account – @vivellis.bsky.social  and you can reach me via the Contact form on this site. 

Key interests represented in the posts on the site are: teacher education and development (institutional structures, history, program design, policy, politics and professional learning; cultural-historical and activity theory (ways of thinking about human development derived from Soviet psychology – Vygotsky & Co; western cultural psychology – Scribner, Cole & friends; and anthropology –  cognitive and otherwise); Language and literacy (across educational settings – with particular interests in the subject English, writing, reading and talk); and comparative studies of education (and specifically education policies related to teacher development, with a particular interest in the UK and Europe, the SWANA region, Australia and China).’