Transforming Education Through Expert Consultancy
Lucy draws on her wide-ranging experience of how education systems function to support national and regional governments with joined-up education policy design.

Lucy with Angel Gurría, the Secretary-General of the OECD

Approach

Lucy has a broad understanding of how education policies and structures interact to produce effects in different contexts, based on her extensive experience studying education systems, which she complements with expertise from her Associates through her company, Crehan & Associates.

This is particularly valuable when applied to her consultancy work, as she can see the relationships between different areas of policy, and potential interactions when designing new systems – interactions that can enhance the impact of a reform, or as is often the case, prevent them from being effective.

Lucy’s input is therefore of most use in the early stages of education reforms, to guide:

  • the identification of system structures and processes which are most likely to lead to the intended outcomes, and
  • the creation of conceptual frameworks, in collaboration with stakeholders, to describe how different elements of the system might work together to support system coherence, and therefore, educational impact.

Within her broad expertise of system structures, Lucy’s particular areas of specialism are:

  • teacher policy (with a special interest in career structures and motivation)
  • curriculum policy (with a special interest in system structures for balancing curricula coherence and school autonomy).

Experience

Lucy has worked with the government in Brunei on a national teacher coaching programme, in collaboration with Education Development Trust. She supported the design of policy on teacher career structures in Myanmar, on behalf of UNESCO. And she worked with the Ministry of Education in Guyana to design a conceptual framework for teacher policy in Guyana, on behalf of the World Bank. Her company, Crehan & Associates, has now been engaged by the Ministry in Guyana to write the National Teacher Policy. Lucy’s research and writing for IIEP UNESCO and UNICEF Innocenti also underpin her consultancy work in this area.

On curriculum, Lucy was commissioned by two regional authorities in Wales to design a process by which teachers could work together across schools to develop a middle-tier curriculum framework, to support coherence in students’ curricula experiences. She then spent two years working with teachers at the local authority level in both Wales and Scotland, supporting them to produce their own curriculum frameworks. She has also advised on national curriculum reform in the Czech Republic, and is currently writing a book on curriculum policy.

Lucy has worked with: