Katherine Davey

I am a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield.

I am currently working on a longitudinal research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust: ‘Mapping Interventions for NEET Young People in England’ alongside Professor Lisa Russell (PI), Dr Ron Thompson and Dr Jo Bishop. The research aims to understand the nature and scope of early intervention programmes targeted at young people ‘at risk’ of becoming NEET and to foreground the voices of the young people accessing them through an ethnographic approach.

In 2022, I was awarded my Doctorate in Education (EdD) at the University of Huddersfield: ‘Learning to Cope on Your Own: The Reflexive Educational Trajectories of High-Achieving Working-Class Girls’. My research has a focus on the relationship between structure, agency and reflexivity in young people’s educational decision making, with a particular lens on the influence of social class and gender.  

I completed my doctoral studies part-time whilst managing and teaching on higher education provision in a large further education college, firstly as Programme Leader for Teacher Education and then as Dean of University Centre. My professional roles have had a strong emphasis on supporting underrepresented groups to enter, succeed in and progress from higher education, including responsibility for the design and implementation of the institutional access and participation plan and leading an OfS-funded multi-agency mental health project. 

I have a first-class integrated master’s degree in French and German from the University of Manchester and have previously worked in education settings in Senegal, Germany and Switzerland. In 2011, I completed a PGCE with QTS and began my career as a modern foreign languages teacher in secondary education. During this time, I gained an MA Education from University of Manchester.