Professor Becky Francis
Becky is Chief Executive Officer of the Education Endowment Foundation
Professor Becky Francis CBE (FBA, FAcSS, PhD) is Chief Executive Officer of the Education Endowment Foundation, and retains a fractional association at UCL. She was previously Director of the UCL Institute of Education (IOE). Her prior roles include Professor of Education and Social Justice at King’s College London, Director of Education at the RSA and Standing Advisor to the Parliamentary Education Select Committee.Becky joined the IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society in July 2016, having been Professor of Education and Social Justice at Kings College London for four years.
She has followed a research career focusing on education and social justice, incorporating education policy work, for example in her previous roles as Director of Education at the RSA, and as Standing Advisor to the Parliamentary Education Select Committee.
Becky is best known for her work on gender and achievement. Her policy research and analysis has focused particularly on school quality, and academies policy, in relation to social equality. Her academic expertise and extensive publications centre on social identities (gender, ‘race’ and social class) in educational contexts, social in/equality, and social identity and educational achievement, and gender theory.
Becky was a member of the REF 2014 sub-panel for Education, and has acted as a judge for various practitioner awards panels, including the National Pupil Premium Awards and the TES Teacher of the Year awards. She is currently directing the Education Endowment Foundation-funded project ‘Best Practice in Grouping Students’, a mixed methods study involving 140 English secondary schools, investigating attainment and non-attainment grouping in relation to social inequality.
