He co-directed the SEN in Secondary Education study and the Making a Statement study, and before that worked on the ground-breaking Deployment and Impact of Support Staff project. Rob’s paper on the classroom experiences of pupils with SEND in mainstream primary schools (1976 to 2012), which drew on data from the latter two research studies, was shortlisted for the 2016 British Educational Research Journal Editors’ Choice Award. Rob is currently leading the Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants school workforce improvement initiative. He is co-convener of the Twitter forum #UKEdResChat, which brings together researchers and practitioners. He tweets @maximisingTAs.