She is a member of the Academy of Social Sciences, and has been visiting Professor at the University of Umea, Sweden, a visiting scholar at Helsinki University, Finland and holds an honorary doctorate from Turku University, Finland. She is a member of ESRC’s Peer Review College. In 2010 Jenny was commissioned by ESRC to write the review of Sociology of Education for the International Benchmarking Review of the discipline of Sociology. She is on the editorial board of the European Education Research Journal (EERJ) and on the editorial advisory board of the British Journal of the Sociology of Education, and of the journal Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. She is a series editor of Routledge’s World Yearbook of Education, (along with Professors Agnès van Zanten, Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Terri Seddon). She is also co-editor of The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Education Policy and Politics (with Bob Lingard) and the New in February 2011 Fabricating Quality in Education (with Professors Peter Dahler-Larsen, Christina Segerholm and Hannu Simola).

Much of Jenny’s working life has been spent in teaching and management. Her first real job was in the National Union of Teachers, where she developed a lifelong commitment to understanding teachers’ working lives, which led to her first connection with Routledge, in its initial existence as Malcolm Clarkson’s Falmer Press. Malcolm took a benevolent interest in Martin Lawn and Jenny Ozga’s efforts to write a book about teachers that engaged with teacher politics, and published their co-authored Teachers, Professionalism and Class in 1981. Jenny continued to work with and on teachers throughout the 1980s, authoring and managing Open University courses on education organizations and professionals, as well as on policy making in the UK, from a policy sociology perspective.

In the last decade, as she has prioritized research, Jenny’s work in education policy has developed an international comparative character, with a focus on governance and knowledge in the context of Europeanisation. This is developing through research on new governance forms and policy technologies, for example data, knowledge and networks. Her most recent funded project, which started in spring 2010, is the ESRC funded ‘Governing By Inspection: School Inspection and Education Governance in Scotland, England and Sweden’ which she co-ordinates with Dr Linda Croxford, Professor Martin Lawn, Dr Sotiria Grek from CES, University of Edinburgh, with Professor John Clarke, the Open University and Professor Christina Segerhom and colleagues at Mid-Sweden and Umea Universities. This approach is also evident in her ESRC funded work (with Margaret Arnott, Glasgow Caledonian University) on UK education policy, which looks at inter-UK policy-relations in the post-devolution context, a topic also pursued in her work on education policy in Scotland (with Sotiria Grek and Martin Lawn) that is part of the European Commission funded knowandpol project.

Her aim is to develop ways of ‘doing comparison’ through studying new governance forms and policy technologies, in order to move beyond ‘context’ and methodological nationalism on the one hand, and ‘globalization’ of everything on the other. She has presented this work at many symposia especially in Sweden and Finland, and at the annual ECER conferences, in the ECER Policy Network 23, of which she was a founding convenor. Her keynote at ECER 2007 dealed with the steering of research, a topic discussed in the collection she co-edited with Terri Seddon and Tom Popkewitz on Education Research and Policy, published by Routledge as the 2006 World Yearbook of Education .

She has worked with, and learned from, many colleagues in continental Europe, especially her partners in the European Science Foundation/ESRC project ‘Fabricating Quality in European Education/Governing by Numbers’ that looked at the Europeanisation of education through data in England, Scotland, Finland, Denmark and Sweden, which she co-ordinated. This project produced a special issue of the Journal of Education Policy (vol 24 no 2) devoted to ‘governing by numbers’ and is now the subject of the new Routledge publication: Fabricating Quality in Education.