Associate ProfessorMatthew Thomas

Associate Professor Matthew Krehl Edward Thomas SFHEA is an established researcher and Deputy Head of School (Education) whose work examines teacher education as a critical system through which professional judgement is shaped, constrained, and enacted. His scholarship investigates how institutional, technological, and policy conditions organise and constrain what educators are able to value, decide, and do. Matthew positions teacher education as a diagnostic site where power, time, policy, and technology converge.

His research examines how structural conditions such as temporality, trauma, accountability regimes, and social arrangements quietly organise teaching and learning, often redistributing ethical responsibility away from professionals and into systems, metrics, and managerial processes. A key strand of his work focuses on trauma-informed practice and child safety principles, analysing how these frameworks are translated into system design and how such translations can either support or erode professional judgement. His more recent research extends this analysis to artificial intelligence, datafication, and surveillance capitalism, examining how automation, metrics, and data extraction increasingly substitute system logics for human judgment in teaching and teacher education. Across his scholarship, Matthew seeks to disrupt dominant power relations and redesign the architectures of educator preparation to foreground ethical judgment, professional capability, and care within complex education systems. He is an editor of Teaching Education, an international peer-reviewed journal, and contributes to global conversations on teacher education reform, professional judgement, and the future of education systems.