John is Professor of Education and Dean of the Faculty of Legal, Social and Educational Sciences at Queen's University, Belfast. He has been engaged in educational research and teacher education at Queen's for 22 years, having begun his career as a teacher in a Belfast grammar school. As Dean, he continues to teach in the Graduate School of Education and his main teaching areas cover evaluative research methods and information technology in education . Since 1990, he has been principal investigator in over 20 large and small-scale projects involving over £1.6 million. These projects have focused on a variety of policy and practice contexts including Reading Recovery, integrated learning systems, consumer education needs, school inspections, portable computers, transition from primary to secondary education, the reliability and validity of tests used for selection to grammar schools, summer literacy schemes and virtual learning environments. As a member of the Council of the British Educational Research Council, he has recently chaired the work of a group comprising Ann Lewis (Birmingham) and Richard Pring (Oxford), which brought forward the Association's recently adopted Revised Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research. He has been a member of the Assessment Reform Group since 1994 and is an elected academician of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences, a fellow of the British Computer Society, a member of the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme Steering Committee, a member of the General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland and a founding member of the Universities' Council for the Education of Teachers – Northern Ireland (UCET-NI).