Rate My Professor Rosie Ridgway

Dr Rosie Ridgway is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at Durham University, where she joined in 2012. With prior experience as a classroom teacher in mainstream and specialist special educational needs schools across the northeast of England, she taught learners in key stages 1, 2, and 3. At Durham, she contributes to undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in education, including initial teacher education and continuing professional development activities. She has developed new programmes and modules at undergraduate level, served as Director of the BA Primary Education programme, and contributed to policy and process development for initial teacher training programmes. Currently, she is the Programme Director for the PGCE International programme based in Geneva, Switzerland, and is developing an online PGCE International programme for launch in the next academic year.

Rosie Ridgway's academic interests centre on using evidence to enhance understanding and decision-making. Her work explores evidence in teaching and research, learner differences including disabilities and special educational needs, policy construction in initial teacher education, and fostering statistical literacy and data science skills for future citizenship. She leads modules such as EDUC1531 Disability and Educational Needs: What’s so special about SEN? and EDUC2431 Disability and Educational Needs: Impairment, Empowerment and Education, and delivers conference workshops and CPD on inclusion and data skills. Through the ProCivicStat project, she has advanced civic statistics education. Key publications include the journal article 'Choice and control: corpus-based discourse analysis of teacher education policy in England (2010-2021)' (Cogent Education, 2023); book chapters 'Covid-19 shows why we need Civic Statistics: illustrations and classroom activities' (2022) and 'Civic Statistics in context: mapping the global evidence ecosystem' (2022) in Statistics for empowerment and social engagement; and contributions to Looking after Literacy (2017) such as 'Supporting Deaf Learners' and 'Supporting struggling learners: teachers, learners, and labels of SEN'. Her doctoral thesis, 'Giving a voice to the Hard to Reach: Song as an effective medium for communicating with PMLD children who have low social tolerance' (Durham University, 2017), underscores her expertise in special needs education.