Leadership and Strategic Responsibilities
Summary of Strategic Leadership and Professional Contributions
I have over 35 years’ experience of strategic leadership across higher education, professional associations, community organisations, public services, and the third sector, operating at the intersection of research, practice, policy, and civic engagement. As Associate Head of School for Education (Research), Director of the Educational Research Centre and Professor of Critical Pedagogy and Participatory Praxis at St Mary’s University, Professor of Critical Pedagogy at Birmingham City University, former National Director of the Professional Association of Lecturers in Youth and Community Work (PALYCW), and Visiting Professor and Council Member of the Freire Institute, I have led institutional development, research strategy, curriculum innovation, public engagement, knowledge exchange, and sector-wide initiatives.
I have led or contributed to over 55 externally funded research projects, serving as Principal Investigator on 35 projects and securing more than £5.5 million from organisations including UKRI, the British Council, Erasmus+, the European Commission, health authorities, charitable foundations, government departments, and local authorities. My research has focused on critical pedagogy, participatory praxis, homelessness, multiple disadvantage, youth and community work, criminal justice, social exclusion, widening participation, civic engagement, and community-university partnerships. Alongside this work, I have undertaken over 75 consultancy, evaluation, and knowledge exchange projects across the UK, Europe, the Caribbean, Asia, and Australia.
My commitment to equality, diversity, inclusion, and social justice is reflected in leadership of anti-racist pedagogy, decolonising curricula, widening participation, and initiatives supporting LGBTQAI+, disabled, care-experienced, Global Majority, and other marginalised students. I have established staff and research networks, shaped institutional policy, and published widely on critical pedagogy, queer pedagogy, race, disability, mental health, and educational inclusion.
I have extensive experience working with external partners, including government departments, health authorities, trade unions, charities, schools, homelessness organisations, criminal justice agencies, and international research partners. I have led the development of accredited programmes, national training strategies, participatory research infrastructures, and co-productive approaches to public engagement and knowledge exchange. My contributions have been recognised through election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, appointment as a National Teaching Fellow and Principal Fellow of Advance HE, and nomination for REF 2021 Main Panel C and Sub-panel 20.
My sector knowledge is underpinned by extensive engagement with REF, TEF, and KEF processes, alongside leadership roles in research, ethics, learning and teaching, quality assurance, and academic governance. I have served on Senate, Research Committees, Ethics Committees, Access and Participation groups, and institutional leadership structures, while contributing to national scholarly networks through BERA, PALYCW, the Critical Pedagogy Network, and the Freire Institute.
Strategic Responsibilities
As National Director of PALYCW, I undertook a comprehensive review and renewal of the Association’s Strategic Plan, developing integrated research, publication, and continuing professional development strategies alongside a strategic vision for 2030 and a sustainable funding framework. Working with six directors and a twelve-member Strategic Development Committee, I successfully balanced competing priorities and delivered organisational development within a complex national policy environment.
At St Mary’s University, the University of Suffolk, and Newman University, I established and led research centres, developed research strategies, increased external funding activity, and fostered interdisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration. I have held leadership positions on School, Faculty, and institutional management teams and contributed to a wide range of committees including Research, Ethics, Learning and Teaching, Academic Standards, Access and Participation, and Professoriate groups. At Suffolk, I was a member of the Centre for Educational Research and Learning Executive, the institutional Ethics Committee, and the Professoriate. At Newman, I served as an elected member of Senate, Research Committee, Academic Standards Committee, and Teaching and Learning Committee.
As Director of the Romero Freire Institute at Newman University, I held strategic responsibility for integrated Foundation Year provision and widening participation initiatives designed to support non-traditional entrants to higher education. The validation panel commended the resulting curriculum for its structure, innovation, and coherence. More recently, I have been leading the validation of a Youth Work Degree Apprenticeship and a Professional Doctorate in International and Community Development and Global Youth Work, both designed to strengthen the relationship between professional practice and higher education.
I have led numerous institution-wide pedagogic and organisational development initiatives. These include a Higher Education Academy-funded project examining the use of student engagement data to improve retention and progression, which contributed to introducing peer mentoring and enhanced personal tutoring and resulted in significantly improved student retention. The subsequent institutional rollout received sector recognition through a CATHE award. I have also provided leadership around threshold concepts, attendance and participation, student-led curriculum development, self-directed tutor groups, pedagogies of discomfort, improvisational assessment, foundation year innovation, and professional practice assessment. My work on professional assessment was commended by a validation panel as “pioneering and ground-breaking.”
More recently, I have developed and led large-scale participatory and co-produced initiatives with organisations including Revolving Doors, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, Inclusive Insight, Homeless Link, Birmingham Citizens, Community Criminology CIC, and the National Academy for Educational Leadership. These projects have addressed drug policy, criminal justice reform, lived experience leadership, educational leadership, homelessness, youth work, and multiple disadvantage, creating sustainable mechanisms for communities to influence policy and practice.
I have also provided strategic leadership in public and community engagement. This has included serving as Institutional Lead for Community and Public Engagement at Newman University, Chair of Birmingham Citizens Leadership Group, member of the Citizens UK Council Executive, and more recently developing a substantial programme of scholarship, funding applications, publications, and public events examining community-university partnerships and civic engagement, culminating in the publication of Higher Education, Community Connections and Collaborations (2025).
Management Experience
I currently manage research fellows and academic staff and provide leadership for research strategy, doctoral education, and research development activities. Across my career I have managed interdisciplinary teams comprising academic, professional, administrative, and research staff. At the University of Suffolk I led multiple research teams comprising academic and professional staff. At Newman University I had managerial responsibility for Youth and Community Work, Criminology, Foundation Year, research, and administrative teams, managing up to fifteen staff. More recently, I have coordinated complex multi-agency partnerships involving universities, NGOs, community organisations, local authorities, government departments, and people with lived experience.
I have extensive experience supporting colleagues through change, resolving complex interpersonal issues, mentoring staff, managing performance, and creating positive and inclusive working cultures. My leadership style is collaborative, developmental, reflective, and values-driven, combining strategic vision with empathy, diplomacy, and a sustained commitment to staff wellbeing and professional growth.
Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion
Equality, diversity, inclusion, and social justice have been central themes throughout my academic, research, and leadership career. I have been an active member of LGBTQAI+ and disability networks and have led significant initiatives focused on anti-racist pedagogy, decolonising the curriculum, widening participation, LGBTQAI+ inclusion, disability justice, and support for care-experienced students. Within the Educational Research Centre, one of our major research themes examines the experiences of marginalised students, including those from Global Majority, working-class, disabled, neurodivergent, LGBTQAI+, and mental health backgrounds.
At Suffolk, I established an Anti-Racist Pedagogy Cluster, led Access and Participation Plan working groups, and coordinated a university-wide decolonising curriculum initiative. This work became embedded within programme validation processes and was subsequently adopted institutionally by senior leadership. I also established a Gender and Sexualities Special Interest Group, a Global Majorities Group, and an LGBTQAI+ Staff Support Network. At Newman, I established an LGBTQAI+ Staff Support Group and led projects examining the experiences of Black students, disabled students, and LGBTQAI+ students. These projects informed mentoring schemes, policy development, committee agendas, and institutional support structures. Research on student mental health and disability contributed directly to the creation of enhanced support systems, including the appointment of dedicated specialist staff.
More recently, my research and scholarship have focused on class, race, disability, neurodiversity, mental health, queer pedagogy, and access to higher education, including books and funded research exploring educational inequalities and institutional transformation. At BCU I am co-leading a participatory project with neurodivergent PGRs to consider how collaborative acts of creating and sharing builds community and solidarity are sites for generating knowledge about lived experiences and reimagining conditions for inclusive doctoral education. We are bidding for a project that aims to develop the first empirically grounded conceptual theory of post-1992 pedagogy, explaining how participation, belonging, agency and hope are generated through pedagogical practices within institutions operating under conditions of widening participation, precarity and institutional constraint. Through collaborative participatory methods the project aims to identify successful, contextualised student-centred pedagogies, examine shaping factors, explore experiences of studying at UG/Masters/ Doctoral levels, develop transformative pedagogical principles, and co-produce a Post-1992 Signature Pedagogies Framework.
Skills in Analysis, Finance, Organisation, and Administration
Across all institutions, I have contributed to strategic planning, organisational development, budgeting, performance management, quality assurance, and institutional governance. I have developed research, evaluation, and impact frameworks, established developmental targets, and implemented evidence-informed approaches to supporting student success, research culture, and organisational improvement. At Suffolk, I developed a research and evaluation strategy for the institution’s Access and Participation Plan and widening participation activity, valued at over £200,000. I also developed frameworks supporting pedagogic scholarship, research development, promotion routes, and teaching excellence. At Newman, I managed programme budgets, contributed to annual planning cycles at both School and institutional level, and participated actively in strategic decision-making through Senate and senior committees. Across multiple organisations, I have developed strategic plans, identified priorities and resource requirements, and translated institutional ambitions into operational delivery.
I have led over 55 funded research projects, including international collaborations with budgets of up to £600,000 and cumulative funding exceeding £5.5 million. My responsibilities have included creating funding bids, developing research designs, establishing governance and ethics procedures, managing finances and risk, coordinating partnerships, monitoring delivery, ensuring compliance with funder requirements, producing REFable outputs and impact case studies, and leading dissemination activities. In addition, I have undertaken more than 75 consultancy, evaluation, and knowledge exchange projects across education, homelessness, criminal justice, youth work, health, and community development sectors. This work has required sophisticated analytical, organisational, financial, and stakeholder-management skills and has consistently translated research into demonstrable improvements in policy, practice, and community outcomes and ethics, managing risk, and ensuring effective dissemination.
Working with External Partners
Over the past three decades, I have consistently engaged in extensive partnership work across a range of sectors, with a particular focus on education, social justice, and community development. Ten years ago, I was invited by the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU) to chair their Political Education Committee and lead the development of a strategic framework for trade union education. This framework was structured around three core pillars: the development of a coherent body of knowledge, the creation of CPD opportunities, and the establishment of professional standards. As part of this initiative, I edited a volume on trade union education featuring contributions from international authors, published by New Internationalist. This collaboration led to the establishment of a dedicated imprint for trade union publications, with a focus on radical education. I currently serve on the editorial board, where I have initiated and reviewed several publications by both emerging and established authors.
In parallel, I contributed to the design and delivery of a Graduate Certificate (Level 4) for activist educators, delivered at Leeds Metropolitan University, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Critical Trade Union Education, developed in partnership with Newman University. We are now advancing a strategic plan to enhance trade union engagement with community organizations, further embedding education within grassroots activism.
My long-standing involvement with the homelessness sector has similarly been underpinned by strategic partnership work. Recognizing the fragmented nature of training and education within the sector (Kain and Van Doorn, 2008), I led a national initiative to professionalize workforce development. This initiative mirrored the tripartite structure used in my trade union work: building a knowledge base, creating CPD pathways, and setting sector-wide standards. I led the development, validation, and delivery of three national courses, including a CPD Postgraduate Certificate in Health and Homelessness at the University of Oxford, an Advanced Professional Certificate, and a professional qualification for new entrants to the field, validated by the Chartered Institute of Housing. All courses were successfully implemented, with two continuing to run.
My contributions were integrated into the Quality Assessment Framework used to evaluate services funded through the Supporting People programme. I also served on an expert panel for the Housing Sector Skills Council, contributing to the development of national occupational standards for Levels 2, 3, and 4. I was part of a successful lobbying effort to the ESRC to establish a funding stream focused on multiply excluded homelessness, subsequently serving on the funding panel. A CEO of a leading homelessness charity remarked, “If anyone has been responsible for developing a consistent and coherent approach to training and development across the homeless sector, it is Mike Seal.” In recognition of this work, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.
Over the past decade, I have developed a substantial partnership with the Revolving Doors Agency, leading and supporting a range of participatory and co-produced research projects focused on multiple disadvantage, criminal justice involvement, and systems change. My work has consistently sought to amplify the voices of people with lived experience through peer research, service-user involvement, and collaborative knowledge creation. I have led major projects including Service User Involvement in Prisons and Probation (2012-2014), funded by the Ministry of Justice and National Offender Management Service, which trained peer researchers across probation services and produced national toolkits for practitioner use, and Commissioning Together (2014-2016), which supported people with lived experience to influence public service commissioning processes. More recently, I have led the Revolving Doors Lived Experience Voices Project (2024-2025), funded by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, which ensures that the experiences of people affected by drug and alcohol issues directly inform national policy and service development. As a Research Associate and long-standing partner of Revolving Doors, I have also contributed to research on probation, prisons, drug treatment, criminal exploitation, recovery, and multiple disadvantage. Throughout this work, I have championed participatory and co-productive methodologies that position people with lived experience as knowledge creators, researchers, and agents of change rather than simply subjects of research.
Over the course of my career, I have worked extensively with Groundswell, a charity dedicated to co-productive work with homeless people – I was one of its founding trustees. I helped to pioneer and evaluate participatory approaches that place people with lived experience of homelessness at the centre of research, service development, training, and policy change. My involvement has spanned more than two decades and has included consultancy, evaluation, peer research, service-user involvement, and homelessness research projects. Key collaborations have included The Escape Plan: Breaking the Cycle of Street Homelessness, an influential peer research study exploring how people move beyond entrenched homelessness; the Homeless Health Initiative and Client Review of Health Services, which examined homeless people’s experiences of healthcare provision; and Streets Ahead, which captured client perspectives on rough sleeping services and informed good practice nationally. I also worked with Groundswell on developing client involvement strategies for organisations such as St Mungo’s, Simon Community Dublin, and Thames Reach, as well as supporting programmes that trained people with experience of homelessness to become accredited trainers and researchers. More recently, I undertook an evaluation for Groundswell exploring the future of client involvement. Throughout this work, I have sought to promote co-production, lived-experience leadership, and participatory research as mechanisms for improving services, influencing policy, and challenging exclusion within homelessness and related sectors
My expertise has been sought internationally, and I have served as a consultant in the United States, Finland, Estonia, Norway, Lithuania, Sweden, Jamaica, India, Bangladesh and Latvia.
Sector Knowledge
I possess a deep and current understanding of the higher education landscape, particularly in relation to research, learning and teaching, and knowledge exchange. I have worked strategically with institutional frameworks such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) and Access and Participation Plans (APP’s) contributing to provider submissions and institutional strategies.
Committee and Academic Responsibilities
My institutional service has been extensive and sustained. I have served on the following committees and working groups:
Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee (2024- present) – St Marys University
Research Excellence Framework Working Party (2024-present) St Marys University
Research Centre Forum (2025- present) – St Marys University
Faculty of Arts, Business, Law, Education and Theology Research Group (2023- present) –
School of Education Research Strategy Group (2025- present) – St Marys University (Chair)
Apprenticeships Quality Board (2024- present) St Marys University
The Centre for the Study of Practice and Culture in Education (CSPACE) Planning Group (2023- present) – Birmingham City University (Chair)
The Centre for the Study of Practice and Culture in Education (CSPACE)(2023- present) – Birmingham City University
The Thea Bowman Centre Operational Group (2025- present) – St Marys University (Chair)
Centre for Research into the Education of Marginalised Children and Young Adults Steering Group (2025- present) – St Marys University (Chair)
Access and Participation Working Group (2020–2021)
REF Working Group (2020–2021)
Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Executive (2020–2021)
Senior Leadership Group, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (2020–2021)
Senate (2013–2015)
Human Sciences Senior Management Group (2010–2017)
Safeguarding and Respect Steering Group (2015–present)
Learning and Teaching Committee (2016–present)
Research Committee (2015–2019)
Research Ethics Committee (2014–2016)
Wellbeing Centre Steering Group (2016–present)
Collaborative Strategy Group (2015–2017)
Mitigating Circumstances Panel (2010–2017)
Higher Degrees Committee (2012–2014)
Academic Standards Committee (2013–2015)
Safeguarding Officer (2017–2018)
These roles have enabled me to contribute meaningfully to institutional governance, policy development, and the enhancement of academic standards and student experience
Social Enterprise
I am a director of two Community Interest Companies. Firstly, the BLESST Centre (Building, Learning, Education, Safe Space, Transition), a Black community work organization in Birmingham that has been commissioned by youth offending teams and the Youth Violence Reduction Unit to run programs for young offenders. Secondly, Community Criminology CIC, a project working inclusively with people to gain new insights into social harm and social justice in Birmingham. I am also a consultant for Inclusive Insight, an NGO dedicated to developing and undertaking participatory research and co-production in the care field, with the active involvement of community members, and PeteHarris4Youth, providing consultancy, training, and research in the Youth Work field.
Professor.Dr Mike Seal
Professor, Researcher, Educator, Author, Youth and Community Worker and Freelancer
Where We Are
Birmingham, United Kingdon
