Professor Christopher Winch

Chris has a degree in Philosophy from the University of Leeds and received his PhD from the University of Bradford in 1982. He has taught in primary, further and higher education. From 2008 until 2012, he was Head of the Department of Education and Professional Studies at King’s.

He has worked at the Thomas Danby College, Leeds, primary schools in Leeds and the West Riding, Glyndwr University and the University of Northampton before coming to King’s in 2004.

Research

Chris is a philosopher of education who is currently interested in professional knowledge and judgement, comparative vocational and professional education and the philosophy of educational research.

He is currently involved in projects on learning outcomes in VET and the future of VET in Europe and is also a member of the team of researchers at King’s who are researching the transitions of the 50% of young people in England who are not intending to go to university.

Teaching

Chris teaches on the following modules:

• Teacher Development International
• Comparative Education

PhD supervision

He is happy to supervise the following topics:

• teacher education
• philosophy of education
• vocational education.

Knowledge transfer

With his colleague, Jeff Bridgford, Chris is currently consulting on an Erasmus-funded project on the harmonisation of European furniture-making and upholstering qualifications (Bolster-Up) (£6.6k). They are responsible for the international synthesis report. This project covers eight countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, England, Germany, Romania, the Netherlands and Poland. 

Chris worked as an associate researcher for an Australian Research Council Project on Expertise and Embodied Virtue, from 2010 -2012. This involved giving one presentation at the University of Wollongong in 2010 and one at the University of Hertfordshire in 2011.

King’s Policy Institute have awarded £4k to Chris and Linda Clarke from Westminster University (with matched funding from Westminster) to host three seminars for policymakers on implementing EU Qualification innovations and their implication for qualification design in the UK. The seminars arise from the 2005-2008 Nuffield Project on the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) which Chris co-directed with Linda Clarke and the 2008-2010 Erasmus project on European Bricklayer Qualifications, on which he was responsible for the international synthesis report, together with the current Erasmus project on furniture-making qualifications in Europe. For this, Jeff Bridgford and Chris are responsible for the international synthesis report. The first of these seminars was held at King’s on 21 November 2013.
 
International 

Since 2007 Chris has been involved in collaboration with a number of India NGOs and universities, mainly on issues concerned with quality in education and the nature of private educational provision, particularly in the ‘low cost’ sector in India. He has worked with the Digantar Foundation in Rajasthan and with the ICICI Bank’s educational development arm on teacher education and professional development. In addition, Chris has lectured or given seminars at the Jawarharlal Nehru University in Delhi, TISS Mumbai, the University of Kerala, TISS Hyderabad and the Azim Premji University, Bangalore.Chris has collaborated extensively with Professor Padma Sarangapani, formerly of TISS Mumbai and then Hyderabad, now at the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bangalore. They have worked together in setting up Philosophy of Education activities in India in collaboration with Rohit Dankhar of the Digantar Foundation and the Azim Premji University, resulting in a highly successful Philosophy of Education workshop in Udaipur, Rajasthan in 2010 and in a conference in Bangalore at the Azim Premji University in 2013. He has also worked with Professor Sarangapani on a research project on private schooling in India funded by the Ministry of Human Resources, which has involved extensive fieldwork in various Indian cities. This has resulted in an edited collection entitled School Education in India: markets, state and quality (2018) Jain, M., Mehendale, A., Mukhopadyay, R.,Sarangapani, P., Winch, C. (eds), London, Routledge.

Further information

For further details, see Chris's research staff profile or see a full list of publications here.