Rate My Professor Nadia Siddiqui

Professor Nadia Siddiqui is a Professor in the School of Education at Durham University, having joined the institution in 2013. Her research specializations encompass school improvement through equalising opportunities, overcoming challenges of access to education in developing countries such as Pakistan and India, and exploring persistent patterns of poverty and inequalities via large-scale datasets including the National Pupil Database, Parent Pupil Matched Data, Higher Education Statistics Agency data, Annual Status of Education Report data, and Longitudinal Study of Young People in England. She investigates indicators of disadvantage influencing children's academic attainment, well-being, happiness, and pathways to success, alongside evaluating educational programmes designed to interrupt poverty cycles. Key evaluations include Philosophy for Children, summer schools during primary transitions, Fresh Start phonics, and Accelerated Reader. Additional interests involve enhancing the quality of social science research, the role of schools in promoting fairer societies, secondary data analysis, understanding poverty, and capacity building for early career researchers.

Siddiqui holds fellowships with the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing and is an affiliate of the Durham University Evidence Centre for Education. She has led independent research grants from the British Academy and Nuffield Foundation, with ongoing projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Education Endowment Foundation, and Department for Education. Notable honors include election as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2023, inclusion in the UPSIGN list of 75 Notable British Pakistani Academics in 2023, and the British Educational Research Association Research Book of the Year 2023 for Making Schools Better for Disadvantaged Students. She has authored influential works such as Making Schools Better for Disadvantaged Students (Routledge, 2022, with S. Gorard and B. See), The Trials of Evidence-Based Education (Routledge, 2017, with S. Gorard and B. See), How Can We Get Educators to Use Research Evidence? (Lulu Press, 2019, with S. Gorard, N. Griffin, and B. See), and Urdu Women’s Digests: Reading for Pleasure Behind ‘Walls and Veils’ (2013). Siddiqui contributes to editorial boards including Educational Review, advisory panels such as the Early Intervention Foundation, and delivers keynotes on evidence-based education and inequalities. She examines and supervises doctoral students to completion internationally and serves as Programme Director for MA Research Methods in Education.