Professor Dr Matt O’Leary is Professor of Education at Birmingham City University. His main research interests focus on education policy and practice in further and higher education, particularly in the context of the professional learning of educators and the development of pedagogic practice.

Professor O’Leary is one of the world’s leading experts on the topic of classroom observation. He is internationally renowned for his extensive body of work on the use of classroom/lesson observation in understanding and improving teaching and learning across colleges, schools and universities. His research has had significant impact in the UK and internationally on education policy and the thinking and practice of education leaders, practitioners and researchers working in all education sectors over the last two decades.

Matt’s expertise has also led to him being invited to deliver keynote talks, lectures, workshops and training sessions across the globe from Venezuela to Vietnam. In addition, his expertise has also been sought by regional, national and international government bodies, as well as national education associations and inspectorates on the use of observation as a tool for understanding and improving the quality of teaching and learning.

He has published over 50 academic articles, research reports and book chapters. He has undertaken research commissioned by the British Council, Department for Education, The Education and Training Foundation, Further Education Trust for Leadership, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), UKRI Higher Education Innovation Funding, University and College Union and the World Bank.

Professor O’Leary’s original, groundbreaking research in the further education (FE) sector in England, funded by the University and College Union (UCU), has had and continues to have far reaching impact on education policy and practice nationally (UCU 2013). This body of work has been instrumental in challenging engrained orthodoxies and influencing policy and practice across education sectors. For example, it has shaped the policy of one of the largest unions in the world, with a dedicated web presence created to capture some of its outputs, along with a review of the main teaching unions’ policies on observation across colleges and schools in the UK. The findings from the UCU project report were widely reported in the national media (e.g. Allen 2014; Morrison 2015) and led to a landmark policy change by Ofsted with the removal of graded lesson observations from its inspection framework.

O’Leary’s work on observation over the last two decades has also had a direct impact on higher education Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and Masters’ level programmes nationally. ITE departments (from primary to post-compulsory) have used his work to inform modular content and design on their programmes for trainee and experienced teachers.

Over the last decade, Professor O’Leary has continued to develop his work on observation more recently in higher education (e.g. O’Leary & Cui 2023; O’Leary & Cui 2020; O’Leary & Savage 2019), with his ongoing research influencing policy, practice, attitudes, awareness and understanding of observation institutionally, regionally, nationally and internationally. His research has helped to inform the development of an innovative scheme of teaching observations that has reconceptualised and reconfigured observation from something traditionally perceived in education as a narrow, performance management mechanism to an expansive, formative and supportive tool of educational inquiry (e.g. O’Leary & Savage 2019; O’Leary & Wood 2017).

Professor O'Leary's most recent work has focused on a radical form of self-observation that he has developed known as unseen observation. In contrast to traditional assessment-based models of observation, unseen observation adopts a teacher-centred approach that empowers teachers to take control of their professional learning by working collaboratively with peers. Professor O’Leary’s innovative model of unseen observation was adopted by the UK’s leading Teacher Training provider Teach First during the Covid-19 pandemic and has since been used across ITE programmes, colleges and universities in the UK and internationally. He recently completed a 2-year externally funded project withj a local Further Education college in which he supported teaching staff to implement unseen observation across the college. The impact has been transformational for teaching and learning and some of the staff involved have captured their experiences in a specially commissioned blog series. Professor O'Leary is currently working on several related projects exploring the use of unseen observation nationally and internationally.

Professor O’Leary has written widely on classroom observation, teaching excellence and professional development. His books include Reclaiming lesson observation: supporting excellence in teacher learning (Routledge 2016), Teaching Excellence in Higher Education: Challenges, Changes and the Teaching Excellence Framework (Emerald 2017) and the highly acclaimed Classroom Observation: A Guide to the Effective Observation of Teaching and Learning - Second Edition (Routledge 2020). His latest book is Developing Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education through Observation. (Routledge 2023), co-written with his BCU colleague Dr Vanessa Cui.

Matt is an experienced supervisor and examiner of PhD/EdD students, with over 30 years of teaching experience in the UK and abroad. Matt currently teaches on the Masters (MA) in Education, the Doctorate in Education (EdD) and the Postgraduate Certificate (PG Cert) in Learning and Teaching in HE. He is currently supervising 5 PhD and 6 EdD students in education.

Professor O'Leary is regularly invited to give conference keynotes, seminars and provide consultancy across a wide range of educational settings in the UK and internationally. As much of Professor O'Leary's research is linked to practice, he works closely with educators at the local, national and international level to share his research and advise on its application in workplace contexts.