About
After a career as a science lecturer in further education in East London, Mark came to the University of Liverpool in 2000 to begin his doctoral research in labour internationalism at the Department of Sociology and Social Policy.
He was appointed as a researcher the following year at the Centre for the Study of the Child the Family and the Law. He became Associate Director of the centre in 2002. There he managed major evaluations of the Liverpool, Sefton and Knowsley Children’s Funds, reporting to local authority commissioners and to the Government Home Office. He was also a member of the national Children's Fund evaluation team, providing guidance on local evaluations.
In 2005 he moved to the Centre of Lifelong Learning as a Senior Research Fellow, where he remained until the disestablishment of the Centre in 2016. There he conducted service and educational evaluations across the University's faculties. He also conducted primary research that focused upon the experience of mothers who were participating in an experimental social and educational inclusion intervention in Liverpool schools. And he became the lead widening participation evaluation researcher for the University of Liverpool. In this role Mark shaped the University’s approach to the evaluation of widening participation, and was central to the design of the institutional Access and Participation Plans, under the Office for Fair Access and later the Office for Students.
He was also responsible for the design and delivery of seminars on critical theory in education, in the arts, in evaluation and in cultural representation, organised in collaboration with the Paulo Freire Institute at the University of Roehampton, the International Herbert Marcuse Society and the international critical research network ‘Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity’.
In this period Mark was invited to make an independent submission to the Liverpool Fairness Commission investigating social inequality, later published as 'Just Managing? What it Means for the Families of Austerity Britiain'. He was the lead researcher on the 'Transformations' project, a NW Unison funded study of women's trade union activism in Liverpool, Manchester and Belfast. He also served on the University's central non-invasive ethics committee for nearly a decade until 2017.
From 2016 Mark was Director of Evaluation and Education Policy, publishing widely on educational policy and practice, and continuing to drive the evaluation of access for disadvantaged students and student success. At this time he was vice-president of the UK Evaluation Society.
In 2018 he was part of the British Council UK HE delegation to India, presenting at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi, and at the University of Madras, Chennai.
From 2017-19 he was the lead researcher for the Bystander evaluation investigating the experience of sexual harassment between students at the University of Liverpool, published as 'Tackling Sexual Harassment in 'the Student Experience'', and from 2020-23 was the lead quantitative impact researcher for the evaluation of UCope, a mental health early intervention service designed to support students with self-harming or suicidal tendencies, published as 'Promoting Student Mental Health in Livepool'.
At the beginning of 2024 Mark changed roles once more. He is now responsible for the development of strategies of Educational Quality, and Enhancement. He is currently exploring the educational potential of University assets such as Ness Botanical Gardens, and also reinstituting the annual John Hamilton Lifelong Learning Lectures.
Mark’s research interests are varied. He has published in the areas of research methodology, visual methods in research, education theory and practice, mental health, policy analysis, social movement analysis and trade union theory.
Mark has had two television appearances as a historical expert on Channel 4’s Time Team two-hour special about the Peasants' Revolt, and on BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?
He has been a returning visiting lecturer on the Social Justice Programme at the University of Pennsylvania, UPENN.
In 2018 he was supported by the Artists International Development Fund of the British Council to do script development work in Philadelphia.
He was the recipient of an award from the International Herbert Marcuse Society in 2023 for his work in political theatre ...
"... at the intersection of the arts and Marcuse's Great Refusal, as a consciousness-raising and labor education theater project in support of labor/community solidarity amidst the current wave of nationwide strikes by students and professors at universities and by workers in other industries across Britain."
Presently Mark is working on a book about Marxism and the mind, called The Historical Mind (working title).
He is the current President of the University of Liverpool and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine UCU.