People

Shuang Chen

Shuang Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Policy. She studies women’s education and demographic transitions in developing country contexts and specialises in educational inequalities and policies in China. Read more here.

Sonia Exley

Sonia Exley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy. In her research she focuses on exploring relationships between state and market in the realm of education policy. She has a longstanding commitment to understanding processes of marketisation and privatisation in education, and how these manifest not only in the day-to-day running of school systems across the world, but also in the wider governance of education and the politics of the education policy making process.
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Timo Fleckenstein

Timo Fleckenstein is Professor of Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy. He is a political scientist by training and specialises in the comparative analysis of welfare states with a regional focus on Western Europe and East Asia. In the domain of education, he studies the policy responses to changing socio-political and socio-economic and conditions, especially shifting skills needs and the social inclusion challenges of knowledge economies; and his education policy research covers early childhood education and care (ECEC), vocational education and training (VET), higher education, and private tutoring.
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Fiona Gogescu

Fiona is an ESRC funded doctoral student and an LSE Fellow in the Department of Social Policy. Fiona’s doctoral thesis explores the mechanisms by which institutional features of different educational systems exacerbate or reduce inequality of opportunity. Her research looks at the extent to which educational systems in the European Union vary in terms of institutional characteristics associated with educational stratification.
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Mobarak Hossain

Mobarak Hossain is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Policy. His research interests include comparative education policies and institutions, inequalities, sociology of education, and cross-border policy diffusion, with a particular (but not exclusive) focus on emerging and developing economies. He uses quantitative methods to address these substantive research interests.
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Berkay Ozcan

Berkay Ozcan is Professor of Social and Public Policy in the Department of Social Policy. Berkay is a social demographer working at the intersection between family processes (divorce, marriage and fertility) and child and economic outcomes (savings, labour supply and type) to understand social stratification.
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Lucinda Platt

Lucinda Platt is Professor of Social Policy and Sociology in the Department of Social Policy. Her interests in education and skills encompass ethnic educational outcomes and interests, early years and cognitive and non-cognitive skill development, and Special Educational Needs.
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Almudena Sevilla

Almudena Sevilla is Professor in Economics and Public Policy in the Department of Social Policy. Almudena is an applied micro economist whose research focuses on the areas of gender, child development, and human capital. Almudena’s current project, PARENTIME, has received Eur. 2M funding from the European Union as part of the ERC Consolidator Grant (2018-2022).
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Kitty Stewart

Kitty Stewart is Associate Professor of Social Policy and Associate Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE). Kitty’s recent research focuses primarily on the causes and consequences of child poverty, the relationship between income and wider outcomes, and policy for young children. Some of her on-going work includes an exploration of whether changes in early years policy in England have affected equality of access to nursery education, building on a previous Nuffield-funded project.
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Margaux Suteau

Margaux Suteau is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Social Policy. Her work lies in the intersection of gender, education and labor economics, and relies on public policy evaluation to understand how we can bridge the gender gap in education and in the labor market. She has been working first on the effect of a change in succession laws granting women the right to inherit from the land in India on these women’s education, labor and marriage markets outcomes (working paper). Margaux is currently working on projects that investigate the under-representation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Her research first explores the significance of access to equipment in creating a gender-neutral environment and then examines the impact of cultural and gender norms on higher education choices.
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Anne West

Anne West’s main area of expertise is in education policy. Her interests are wide ranging and cover all phases of education. Her current research focuses on school-based education in England and changes to governance following the introduction of ‘private’ academy trusts, now the main providers of state-funded secondary schools. She is also conducting comparative research focusing on school reforms and accountability in England and the US, complementing her earlier European comparative research on privately-run, publicly-funded schools. Anne West’s research in the field of nursery education / early years education has addressed legislation, ideas and policy development over time in England, and early years education and care policies and funding in comparative European perspective.
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