About
Deb Outhwaite has held senior roles in secondary, post-16, and system leadership in England. She has nearly twenty years of experience of teaching and leading in Higher Education and works at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Education. She is Chair of BELMAS (2023-2026), along with being a Visiting Senior Fellow at London School of Economics for Education Policy, she is an Associate Fellow at the CCCSE at UCL. An academic, and former education charity CEO, Deb gained her LSE MSc in 1997, and her professional doctorate in Educational Leadership in 2016.
Deb is the Director of Studies for the MA Education Online at Liverpool, where she has been an EdD Supervisor since 2017, supervising professional doctorates with senior education leaders from around the globe, including Japan; Hong Kong; China; Canada and the UAE, and has 20 completions. She has now examined more than 25 theses across areas of professional practice in educational leadership in the UK, but also in Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Nigeria.
Deb has co-convened the Leadership Preparation and Development Research Interest Group https://www.belmas.org.uk/ since 2015, and has published more than 60 papers, book chapters, and textbooks. She is a former Vice-Chair of a Multi-Academy Trust. A current Governor of an 11-16 school in Derby City and a Member of School Trust in Hertfordshire https://www.hockerill.com/ that delivers the International Baccalaureate’s Diploma Programme. She is a proud Fellow of https://chartered.college/, Fellow of https://www.thersa.org/, Fellow of CollectivED | Research | Leeds Beckett University, and Fellow of the instituteforequity.ac.uk. She sits on the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Education and is a Regional Lead for the campaigning group https://womened.com/.
Deb is a pracademic – interested in knowledge exchange with research that includes the perspectives of a wide range of leaders and practitioners, particularly women, helping to generate agency, and inform change to create better system equity.
Selected publications
Outhwaite, D, and Simon, C. (2023) Leadership and Management in Education Studies: Introducing Key Concepts of Theory and Practice, Oxon: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Leadership-and-Management-for-Education-Studies-Introducing-Key-Concepts/Outhwaite-Simon/p/book/9781032343013
Gibson, M. and Outhwaite, D. (2021), ‘MATification: plurality, turbulence and effective school governance in England at times of crises’, Management in Education, Special Edition in Governance and Governing, November 2021: https://doi.org/10.1177/08920206211051473
Outhwaite, D. and Soni, D. (2019), ‘The role of a Specialist Leader of Education in England: position, timing, challenges and opportunities’, In Leading in Change: Implications of School Diversification for School Leader Preparation in England and the United States, Storey, V.A. (Ed), University of Central Florida, Information Age Publishing, Inc. https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Leading-in-Change
Outhwaite, D. and Ferri, G. (2017), ‘Critical Reflections on Modern Elite Formation and Social Differentiation in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme in England’, Oxford Review of Education, Special Issue ‘New Educational Researchers in the UK’, 43:4, 402-416 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2017.1329719
Expertise
Leadership Preparation and Development; Interdisciplinary Learning; EDI (particularly Gender) and Professional Practice