Prof Trevor Gale
Professor Trevor Gale
SENIOR ASSOCIATE
Dr Trevor Gale is Emeritus Professor and elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK. He is a critical sociologist of education with research interests in the policy and practice of socially just education, drawing primarily on the disciplinary resources of sociology but also working across aspects of anthropology, history, philosophy, political science, social geography and welfare economics.
His research has been competitively funded by research councils, government departments and philanthropic trusts, and focused on the reproduction of inequalities in and through policies and practices in formal education systems, particularly systems of higher education and schooling. He has led 40+ funded research projects and authored 100+ peer-reviewed publications – books (10), chapters (30+), articles (70+). In 2022 Elsevier ranked him in the top 1% of the world’s most cited researchers (from 1996 to 2021) in his field. From 2002 to 2022 he was the founding and chief editor of Critical Studies in Education. Under his editorship, CSE became the highest ranked sociology of education journal in the world (IF3.9 in 2022).
From 2008-2011 he was the founding director of Australia’s National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education. He is a past president of the Australian Association for Research in Education (2005), a past member of the Wales Education Commission (2016-2019) and has served on government and professional boards (including appointments by the Australian Deputy Prime Minister). From 2015-2019 he was Head of the School of Education at the University of Glasgow, presiding over its rise to 1st on three UK league tables, its entry into the top 50 in the QS World University Education subject rankings and into the top 10 Schools of Education in the UK in REF2021 (from 22nd in REF2014).
From 2019 to 2022 he was a member of the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Grant Assessment Panel. From 2021 to 2023 he was an Expert Evaluator for the European Commission’s Horizon Europe research funding scheme and its Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships (MSCA-PF). In 2023 he served on the German Research Foundation’s Excellence Strategy panel. He has also reviewed grant applications for UKRI Research Councils (ESRC, AHRC, MRC), the Australian Research Council and the Israel Science Foundation.
Professor Gale has considerable experience working with early and mid-career academics to build their research capabilities, including research retreats, seminars and one-on-one support in career and CV development, grant writing (particularly for research council funding), and academic writing and publishing. He has served on numerous appointment panels and is regularly invited by universities around the globe to review applications for advertised positions and promotion, and by learned societies in the social sciences to review membership submissions.