My Background

Personal Profile

My whole life revolved one way or another around international education.

As a son of an internationally engaged academic I was exposed from a young age to that sense of universality across cultural differences that is inherent to academic pursuit.  

Eventually I became an international student and academic myself. As an Erasmus student at the University of Leeds, I got to know and appreciate a different culture of teaching and learning, and experienced directly the hurdles and pains of credit transfer across higher education systems. 

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This was pretty much around the same time in which the Bologna Accord that kickstarted the Bologna process, and the development of an European Higher Education Area, was being signed not far away from the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bologna where I studied my degree. 

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My Erasmus experience was key in making me decide to come back to the UK to pursue my PhD studies. Four stimulating years in London, studying an innovative interdisciplinary Doctoral programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies at the London Consortium, where I understood first hand how important interdisciplinary is if we are serious in seeking to push boundaries and drive innovation in thought and practice, and how difficult it is to do it seriously.     

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After going back to Bologna to study for a European MA in International Human Rights whilst preparing to discuss my PhD viva, I moved to Dublin for my first academic position as Post-Doctoral Global Networks Research Fellow at the Institute for International Integrations Studies, Trinity College Dublin, where I carried out research on the the role of global civil society in democratising globalisation. Those were the days of the first World Social Forum events in Porto Alegre, and the hope it carried for a globalisation working for the many rather than the few through coordinated global social action.

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Then a short spell combining sessional teaching contracts, whilst volunteering in international NGOs such as War on Want and the One World Trust. The latter experience, once transposed into higher education, would define pretty much the rest of my professional career. At the One World Trust I was supporting a very interesting initiative aimed at benchmarking the accountability of global operators, such as multinational corporations, inter-governmental and international non-governmental organisations.

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Fast forward a couple of years, I joined the UK Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), where I ended up leading on the quality assurance of UK Transnational Education (TNE). That is, how to make sure that UK higher education providers remain accountable when they operate globally.

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The rest is recent professional history, including:

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- advocating globally for closer cross-border dialogue and cooperation in the quality assurance and regulation of TNE 

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- transitioning into qualification recognition, advocating for closer links between the qualification recognition and quality assurance communities to support flexible learning pathways  (the coming into force of the UNESCO Global Recognition Convention was good timing for that)

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- joining the Board of Directors of the International Network of Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE), with a specific view to helping making progress on the above points

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- and ultimately offering independent consultancy to continue to support the growth of much needed quality international education

(Q-Intled) 

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I very much look forward to working with the international education and quality assurance community, sharing my expertise, time and passion, to help unlocking the socially progressive potentials of international education, and working together, across national boundaries and cultural differences, to make international education work for the many and as a force for good