Dr. Michael Watts
specialises in education in the low- and middle-income countries of the Global South, education for human development, policy analysis and qualitative and mixed methods evaluation and research. He has over 20 years’ experience working across all educational sectors – from basic to higher education – as researcher, trainer, teacher and supervisor. His work focuses on educational equity and the role of education in promoting human well-being. He has worked in South East Asia and Sub Saharan Africa as well as the UK. His work typically involves project design, training of local counterparts, team leadership, data collection and analysis, report writing and sharing his research through conferences and journal publications. He is concerned with individual experiences of education and their relationships with the wider economic and socio-cultural factors that generate educational problems. His training in the sociology and philosophy of education provides insight into these relationships and his practical experience allows him to propose feasible, context-specific solutions. He is especially interested in the adaptive preference problem and the conditions that lead people to downgrade their educational aspirations and has published widely on this topic.