John Furlong

John Furlong is a British educationist, author, and academic. He is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oxford, an Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, and an adviser to the Welsh government on Initial Teacher Education (ITE). Since 2015, he has been Vice President of the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS), which supports equal educational opportunities for children and young people. Furlong's sociological research has focused on issues in education including disaffected pupils, the impacts of classroom language on learning, new technologies on learning, and teacher education. He is the editor of eight books and author of further eleven books, including, Education – an Anatomy of the Discipline, Teacher Education in Transition: re-forming professionalism? and a memoir, Islands – in Search of brave new worlds. In addition, he has published over 100 articles, book chapters and reports. He is the recipient of the Order of the British Empire for his services in educational research In 2014, the Oxford Review of Education published a special issue celebrating his lifetime contribution to the sociology of education. and in 2023, his 2003 paper 'BERA at 30; have we come of age?' was chosen by the British Educational Research Journal as one of the 10 best papers of its decade. Furlong is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and has been a member of Research Excellence Framework (REF) sub-panels in Education in the UK and in Hong Kong. Early life and education As he describes in his 2023 memoir Islands; in search of brave new worlds, after graduating, Furlong decided to pursue a career in education rather than business. In 1971, he became a teacher of social studies in an inner London secondary modern school, at the same time enrolling on a PhD programme at City University, London. His thesis, "Social Interaction in the Classroom; a participant observation study of pupils’ classroom life", focused on the lives of Afro-Caribbean teenagers at the school where he taught.