In 1993 Jon led the PGCE team at Canterbury Christ Church University to establish a PGCE Secondary program premised upon a structure of professional values – the first of its kind in the country. As a result of this work, he wrote Subject Mentoring in the Secondary School, with James Arthur and John Moss (Routledge, 1997) and edited Learning to Teach English in the Secondary School, with Jane Dowson (Routledge, 1997, 2003, 2009), both of which were placed on the reading list of HMI inspecting ITE.

Subject Mentoring in the Secondary School was the first book published in the UK to propose Initial Teacher Education (ITE) based upon subject mentoring as opposed to the existing model of generic mentoring. The subject-mentoring model of ITE subsequently became the dominant approach of teacher education in the UK.

As a result the success of the professional values based ITE at Canterbury Christ Church, Jon has acted as consultant to the Teacher Training Agency/Training and Development Agency for Schools and the Department for Education and has served on a variety of working groups. Most significantly in relation to ITE, from 2000 – 2001 he was a member of TTA’s Revision of Circular 4/98 (which governed ITE) and Strengthening Assessment for the Award of QTS Working Groups, which established a set of professional values - Standards for the Award of Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). From 2005 – 2006 Jon was a member of the Training and Development Agency’s Revision of Standards Working Group. Subsequently, he wrote the Guidance for the Standards for the Award of QTS published by the TDA in 2007 to support university tutors and student teachers.

From 2004 – 2006 he was co-director of the KITE project researching the professional knowledge and identity of teacher educators in English universities. In 2005 Professional Values and Practices(Routledge) was published, which he co-authored with James Arthur and Malcolm Lewis. From 2005 – 2008 he served as a member of the Executive of the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers.

Jon has lectured on teaching and learning, teacher education and citizenship education in ten countries throughout Europe - from Finland to Portugal – and in the USA, Canada, Africa and Asia. He has also acted as advisor to a number of ministries of education worldwide.

He serves on a number of editorial boards including the British Journal of Educational Studies and the Journal of Citizenship Teaching and Learning. He wrote Social Literacy, Citizenship Education and the National Curriculum (Routledge 2000) with James Arthur and William Stow and since 2002 he has been deputy director of the CitizED project.

From 2007 - 2010 he led the Primary/Secondary school transition strand of the ‘Learning for Life’ national research project funded by the Templeton Foundation. The report of this research Character in Transition, together with all strand reports, is available on the project website .

His most recent publications return to the areas of English and Media: Debates in English (Routledge, 2010) and, edited with Elaine Scarratt, the Media Teacher’s Handbook (Routledge, November 2011): first text on media education in the UK to draw together the three key elements of secondary sector teaching in relation to media study: the theoretical, the practical and the professional.

Jon is fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Higher Education Academy and the College of Teachers. Since 2006 he has been Chair of the Society for Educational Studies, which celebrates its 60th Anniversary in December 2011. The Society’s journal, the British Journal of Educational Studies, celebrates its 60th Anniversary in 2012. To mark the occasion the book Education Matters, co-edited with James Arthur and Richard Pring, will be published in the Routledge Education Heritage Series in March 2012.