I am an educator, researcher and trade union activist with many years working in schools and universities. I am Professor Emeritus in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the School of Education, University of Nottingham.
My research interests have focused mainly on industrial relations in the education sector (schools, further, higher and adult education). This work has been completed in the UK, Europe and in several countries in Africa, Australasia and in North and South America. I have undertaken research projects for the European Trade Union Committee for Education (ETUCE) and Education International (EI) as well as several individual trade unions. Recent research papers have been submitted through EI to the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on the Teaching Profession and the Joint ILO/UNESCO Committee of Experts on the Application of Recommendations Regarding Teaching Personnel. I have published numerous reports, articles and books – a full list is available here.
My most recent book, ‘Educational Leadership and Antonio Gramsci: the Organising of Ideas‘, was published by Routledge in 2024. While ‘thinking our problems in a Gramscian way’ (as Stuart Hall exhorted us to do) it captures many of my own ideas about the relationship between activism, political education and social change.
In this extraordinary work, Howard Stevenson both sets out a rigorous and highly relevant reading of Gramsci’s key ideas, and offers a devastating critique of neoliberal trends in education, its political conceptualisation, and the historical context that produced them. Focussing particularly on concepts of educational leadership, this is, at the same time, a crucial contribution to the sociology of education, an excellent introduction to Gramsci for any interested reader, and a profound and acute analysis of our historical moment and the political forces that have produced it.
Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at University of East London.
As an educator I have worked in schools, universities and in adult education including as a tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association, the Open University and as a contributor to several trade union education programmes. I am currently a tutor with the General Federation of Trade Unions Educational Trust, where I lead two programmes – the Trade Union Leadership and Innovation Programme (TULIP), and ‘Lessons in Organising‘ a course focused on grassroots union building. Further details of these programmes, including information about enrolling is available here.
Throughout all my working life I have been an active trade unionist seeking to connect my academic work and activism, with each informing the other. I was previously a Divisional President in the National Union of Teachers, and I have spent two periods as President of the University of Nottingham branch of the University and College Union (one of UCU’s largest branches).
Most of my work, research and activism has been focused on the education sector, but more recent work, including with GFTU, has involved me working with trade unionists in health and public services, communications, entertainment industries, food production and transport.
This isn’t recent – but its a good representation of what I was saying in 2018, and a pretty good representation of what I am still saying about the need to connect organising around practical and immediate issues with a more compelling narrative about what an alternative vision of the future needs to look like.
Howard Stevenson 