Chris Chapman PhD, MA, BSc (Hons), FRSA – Director
Professor Chapman is Chair of Educational Policy and Practice at the University of Glasgow and Director of Policy Scotland. He is also Co-Director of ESRC/Scottish Government funded What Works Scotland Centre (WWS) and Founding Director of the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change. He serves as a member of the First Minister’s International Council of Education Advisors and is adminseconded as Senior Academic Advisor to Scottish Government’s Attainment Challenge. Prior to his move to Glasgow in January 2013 he was Professor of Education at the University of Manchester and previously held academic and research posts at the universities of Nottingham and Warwick. Before moving into academia Chris taught in challenging secondary schools in Birmingham where he undertook a part-time MA before completing his PhD thesis on intervention and improvement in schools in challenging circumstances.
Chris’s research interests focus on the interaction between educational and public policy and practice, specifically in relation to the improvement of outcomes in disadvantaged settings. The recurring themes are leadership, improvement and effectiveness, collaboration, equity, and organisational/system reform. Chris has undertaken research and evaluation projects for research councils, charities, national and local governments and their agencies. Chris has also led D&R projects with national and local government, schools and teachers to build the capacity for leading and managing change and improving student outcomes. Chris has published 11 books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters and he also serves on a number of editorial boards. Chris has held a number of Visiting Professorships.
Chris has served as Treasurer of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) and continues to serve as a Non-executive Director. Chris also served as an inaugural Non-executive Director of the Scottish College for Educational Leadership and continues to work as a Professional Advisor to Education Scotland, the National inspection and improvement agency.
Des McNulty – Deputy Director
Desmond McNulty is Deputy Director of Policy Scotland and also Assistant Vice-Principal, Economic Development and Civic Engagement at the University of Glasgow. Des was appointed in 2016 as Vice Chair of the Glasgow Commission on Economic Growth, which provides strategic advice on economic development to the eight local authorities in the Glasgow City Region City Deal. He has written extensively about social inclusion, resilience, public service reform, poverty and inequality. Along with Policy Scotland colleagues he co-edited ‘The Scottish Economy’, a living book with a dedicated website: www.scottisheconomy.scot. Having managed knowledge exchange for the ESRC Flagship Urban Big Data Centre he is particularly interested in the use of ‘big data’ for civic innovation.
Between 1999 and 2011 Des was an elected member of the Scottish Parliament, and served in a number of roles including as Minister for Communities and Social Justice and as opposition spokesperson on Education and Transport. For five years he was Chair of the Parliament’s influential Finance Committee. Before entering the Scottish Parliament in 1999, he held senior positions as an elected member of Glasgow City and Strathclyde Regional Councils. He has extensive experience of serving on non-departmental public bodies such as Greater Glasgow Health Board and the Equality and Human Rights Commission. He is a board member of one of Scotland’s leading social enterprise companies, the Wise Group. Des headed the board supervising the 1999 Festival of Architecture and Design, a UK cultural festival awarded to the city of Glasgow.
Duncan Maclennan CBE FRSE FAcSS
Duncan is an applied economist with interests in cities, neighbourhoods, infrastructure and housing. He is currently Professor of Public Policy at the University of Glasgow, Professor of Strategic Urban Management and Finance at the University of St Andrews and a Professorial Research Fellow in Urban Economics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
His current research is concerned with economic drivers and productivity consequences of metropolitan investment strategies for infrastructure and housing and of the fiscal and spending autonomies in sub-national levels of government. He has recently completed work on infrastructure in Scotland, city deals and devolution in the UK, as a Knowledge Leader for the ESRC, and completed two reports for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute on productivity effects of housing outcomes and on the role of public housing stock transfers in creating successful non-profits. He plays a lead role in the cross-national collaborative housing policy project on Shaping Futures and is currently undertaking research on presenting and modelling the economic impacts of housing investment for the Government of New South Wales and the New South Wales Housing Federation. Recently published academic work includes research on housing transitions in China, the role of housing and inequality if Piketty’s model, housing impacts on entrepreneurship, modelling regional house price cycles and city deals in the UK.
Duncan, a graduate of the University of Glasgow, was appointed to a personal Chair in Applied Economics at Glasgow in 1983 ( an subsequently was the first holder of the Mactaggart Chair) and was Director of the ESRC’s Centre for Housing Research and Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow from 1983-1997, Director of the ESRC Cities, Competitiveness and Cohesion Programme from 1996-99, and Economic Adviser to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation from 1989-99 and directed their research programmes on Housing and the Macro-economy and on Neighbourhood Regeneration in the 1990’s. He has held visiting Chairs at the Wharton Business School, the Department of Economics at the University of California (Berkeley) and RMIT (Melbourne).
From 1999-2008 Duncan worked in government. He was Special Adviser to the First Ministers of Scotland from 1999-2003, then a Chief Economist in the State Government of Victoria and Chief Economist in the Federal Department for Infrastructure and Cities in the Federal Government of Canada. Prior to that Duncan was on the Board of Scottish Homes for an decade and was chair of care and repair Scotland from 1988-93. He has advised the Prime Minister’s Office on housing and cities issues in Canada (2004-5), New Zealand (2008-9) and Australia (2012-14) and was lead consultant on housing and city issues to OECD from 1978-93.
He has recently served on the RICS Commissions for Housing in the UK and Scotland, on the Northern Housing Commission, The Fairer Fife Commission and is currently and Economic Commissioner for the Glasgow Region City Deal. He now lives in Canada and Scotland.
Professor Duncan Maclennan CBE FRSE FAcSS FRSA RICS RTPI CIH
David Waite – Research Associate
Dr David Waite is a Research Associate within Policy Scotland and Urban Studies. In this role, David provides research support to the independent Commission for Economic Growth linked to the Glasgow city-region City Deal. David received his PhD in geography at the University of St Andrews in 2015. His research interests cover areas of economic and human geography, looking at: one, the linkages between city-region and devolution policies in the UK; two, the integration of multi-location firms at second-tier city-regions; and, three, the application of critical realism within the social sciences. David worked as a research associate at Cardiff University prior to arriving at Glasgow, and, with colleagues at the School of Geography and Planning, he researched the emergence of city-region initiatives in south-east Wales. David has worked on public policy issues in the UK and New Zealand.
Sharon Chisholm – Affiliate
Sharon currently directs Shaping Futures: Housing Policies for the 21st Century, an international multi-sectoral knowledge exchange project. She managed a similar project, New Times: New Business: Housing Provision in Times of Austerity, while at the University of St Andrews. She contributed to research for the Government of Norway on options for evolving a more efficient housing rental sector and advised the Province of Nova Scotia on housing policy. She was the Knowledge Exchange Specialist and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews from 2009-2012 where she represented the university as a Governor with the Scottish Universities Insight Institute and was a member of the St Andrews Knowledge & Enterprise Group (StAKE).
Sharon brings experience from a long career in progressively senior positions in Canada with municipal governments (Ottawa & Dartmouth), community based housing groups (Access Housing) and as ED of Canada’s preeminent national housing association, Canadian Housing & Renewal Association, where she honed her skills in policy, development, research and advocacy.