Dr Lucy Barker

Assistant Professor

School: Communities and Education

My pro-active leadership transformed the teaching for inclusive practice across Education programmes. In response to The Carter Review of Initial Teacher Education, (DfE, 2015), that emphasised the urgent need to improve the Special Educational Needs and Inclusion elements of teacher preparation, I placed the inclusive pedagogical approach, advocated by Florian and Spratt (2013), at its core. Consequently, students on undergraduate and post-graduate primary education programmes became more confident in their understanding of inclusive practice and adaptive teaching from the Core Content Framework for ITE (DfE, 2019). Colleagues in Education also align these fundamentals of inclusive practice in their own subject teaching. OFSTED inspection of Northumbria University ITE in 2024, reported that ‘trainees gain a well-informed understanding of the needs of pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) and who speak English as an additional language. Trainees consistently draw on their learning to meet the needs of these pupils’. Thirty years’ experience teaching and leading in schools as a SENCo and an Assistant headteacher, and my role as a placement lead has supported the development of practice in ITE, my research on enacting inclusive pedagogy, and my strong communication skills within a network of schools. l aim to facilitate co-production of research between school stakeholders (including children, young people, governors, mentors in schools, school leaders, teachers, teaching assistants) and PGR students, leading to improved outcomes for including all children and young people.

Campus Address

Block D Department of Social Work, Education and Community Wellbeing
Coach Lane Campus West, Northumbria University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE7 7XA

Email Lucy

Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

Dr Lucy Barker is an Assistant Professor in Education in the Department of Social Work, Education and Community Wellbeing and the Academic Strategic Lead for Universal Design for Learning (UDL) at Northumbria University. In this pivotal leadership role, she drives institutional transformation in teaching and learning, partnering strategically with Student and Library Academic Services (SLAS) and Education Strategy colleagues to embed equality, diversity, inclusion (EDI) and universal design principles across the university. She also serves as the sole UK ETEN Co-Ordinator (ECO) for the Equality and Teaching Excellence Network, a core leadership position through which she represents Northumbria University at network meetings, facilitates strategic networking on behalf of the institution, and actively shapes ETEN's growth and development internationally. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Lucy is a SIG Convenor for Arts-Based Educational Research at the British Educational Research Association (BERA). Lucy's groundbreaking approach to research as an A/R/Tographer—an academic who inquires through her roles as 'Artist, Researcher, Teacher'—enables her to perform creative scholarship through three interconnected lenses of the artist, researcher, and teacher. Her research pioneers the use of visual research methodologies such as collage to fundamentally challenge and disrupt traditional paradigms of knowledge acquisition. Lucy architects innovative, theoretically robust curricula that honour both verbal and visual literacies. As an artist educator, she harnesses the transformative power of bringing diverse knowledge bases into dynamic dialogue with one another. Her artistry and research form the bedrock of her curriculum design and teaching practice.

Her unwavering commitment to education is rooted in a social justice agenda. Throughout her career trajectory, from primary teacher and SENCo (Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator) to Assistant Headteacher and now Assistant Professor in higher education, she has championed inclusive practice and actively transformed young people's life trajectories, fighting for the fundamental right of all to participate fully in education. Through her research and teaching, and as a lead member of the Inclusive Research Group, a member of the Inclusion and Social Justice Research Working Party and the Disability, Neurodiversity, Mental Health and Lived Experience Group, she works to dismantle all forms of discrimination in learning environments, particularly for children, young people and adults who are neurodivergent and/or face marginalization, exclusion or underachievement. As SIG Convenor for Arts-Based Educational Research at BERA, she leads collaborative initiatives and mentors emerging scholars in arts-based methodologies.

Her 2023 doctoral thesis, 'Myth, Metaphor, Materialism and Metamorphoses: An A/R/Tographic Inquiry Into The Inclusive Pedagogy Of Student Teachers', represents a paradigm shift in understanding inclusive teaching. Through an innovative postmodern, feminist, and materialist theoretical framework, the research illuminates how pre-service teachers develop confidence and expertise in inclusive pedagogy. Presented through a distinctive art and literature-based methodology, the thesis delivers critical insights that reframe student teachers not as isolated practitioners but as embodied agents within the learning space. By deploying myths, poetry, novellas, and artists' voices as analytical tools, Lucy demonstrates the agency of inclusive practice in action. Her further research exposes the complex power dynamics, everyday intra-actions, and calculated risks essential to enacting inclusive pedagogy, while also investigating curriculum development in free schools and the multifaceted factors contributing to student absenteeism. Her research methods and findings, disseminated through international conferences and university-led PGR events, have demonstrably influenced pedagogical practice and research methodologies across the educational research community.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Exploratory analysis of inter-connected factors related to secondary school absenteeism: Caregivers’ perspectives, Carrick, A., Chen, R., Littlefair, D., Friedman, S., Mulholland, K., Hudson, K., Graham, P., Graham, P., Davies, C., Barker, L., Cordier, R. 1 Jan 2026, In: International Journal of Educational Research
Curriculum Beyond Constraint: Stakeholder Perspectives on Innovation and Autonomy in a Free School, Barker, L., Littlefair, D., Million, C. 30 Oct 2025, In: ELA Journal of Educational Leadership in Action
Collage as a Co-Created Site of Inquiry for Becoming Inclusive, Barker, L. 9 Jan 2024, ECQI2024, Leuven, Belgium, European Network for Qualitative Inquiry (ENQI)
Born Free: How to create a School, Barker, L. 20 Jun 2023
Born Free: How to create a School, Littlefair, D., Barker, L., Million, C., Khatib, M. 20 Jun 2023, In: Journal of the European Teacher Education Network (JETEN)
‘A day in the life’: Supporting trainee teachers in finding the ‘Keys to inclusion’ though a case study of one mainstream school’s inclusion of a child on the autism spectrum, Barker, L. 17 May 2021
Working with your teaching assistant, Barker, L. 19 Feb 2021, Early Careers in Education, Bingley, Emerald
What next? Beginning teaching and moving forward, Barker, L. 2018, Primary Teaching , London, SAGE

PGR Supervision

Andrea Carrick Empowering Home–School Partnerships: A Co-Created Intervention for Addressing School Attendance Problems Linked to SEN(D) Start Date: 01/10/2024