Steve Strand

Professor of Education | St Cross College

About me

Professor Steve Strand OBE has been Professor of Education at the University of Oxford since January 2013. Previously he was Professor of Education at the University of Warwick (2005-2012), Head of Research and Data Analysis at GL assessment, the UK’s leading educational test and assessment publisher (1998-2005), and Head of Research and Evaluation at Wandsworth (1990-1998) and at Croydon (1988-1990) Local Education Authorities, and in these roles was responsible for pioneering work on ‘value added’ analyses of school effectiveness. He holds a BA First Class (1982) and PhD (1989) in Psychology.

His research interests are in ethnic, social class and gender gaps in a wide range of educational outcomes and he is particularly interested in the interface between equity and school effectiveness. He has worked extensively with Government departments and Local Authorities on the analysis of pupil achievement data and school effectiveness. His methodological expertise is in the quantitative analysis of large and complex longitudinal datasets such as the National Pupil Database (NPD) and UK Longitudinal Panel Studies. For 10 years he led the Quantitative Methods (QM) hub in the Oxford Department of Education.

He was Special Adviser to the House of Commons Education Select Committee Inquiry into the Underachievement in Education of White Working Class Children (2013-14), and Consultant to the England Department for Education (DFE) Black Pupil’s Achievement Group (2007-09) and Gender Agenda (2007-08). He currently serves on DFE Advisory groups for the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) Futures Longitudinal Study, the Second Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE2), and the Education and Outcomes Panel Study C (EOPS-C). He is joint editor of the Oxford Review of Education and a serving or past member of the editorial boards of the British Educational Research Journal, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Educational Review, Research Paper in Education and Review of Education. He was a member of BERA Executive Council (2000-2003) and served as a full member of the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 Panel for Education. He was awarded an OBE for services to Equality and to Human Rights in the New Year Honours list 2025.

Research

Books

Book chapters

Conference papers

Journal articles

Reports

Subjects Taught

  • MSc in Education (Research Design and Methodology)
  • MSc in Learning and Teaching
  • DPhil in Education

Doctoral Applications

Steve welcomes doctoral applications from students interested in the following research areas:

  • Equity, particularly regarding ethnicity and social class, in students educational achievement and progress at school
  • Ethnicity and social class in other students outcomes such as identification for special education, exclusion from school, continuation in education post 16, entry to Higher Education etc.
  • School effectiveness and the impact of pupils background on school performance e.g. ‘value-added’ assessment

Regarding all the above, Steve is specifically interested in students wanting to engage in quantitatively based research or mixed methods research involving quantitative data