Loic Menzies
Loic is an Intellectual Forum Senior Research Associate.
Loic Menzies is a researcher and policy specialist.
He is editor of Young People on the Margins: Priorities for action in education and youth and has authored numerous high-profile studies of issues ranging from teacher recruitment and educational assessment to youth homelessness.
Loic was previously Chief Executive of the ‘think and action-tank’ The Centre for Education and Youth and is a former teacher, youth worker and tutor for Canterbury Christ Church University's Faculty of Education. He has also been a school governor and a trustee of a number of youth and social entrepreneurship charities.
He is currently researching and writing his second book 'How Education and Youth Policy Happens' for Routledge and is a Visiting Fellow at the Sheffield Institute of Education. He is also an Associate Education Specialist for Cambridge University Press and Assessment's Assessment Network.
You can follow him on Twitter @LoicMnzs.
What are you working on now?
I'm currently writing my second book for Routledge, entitled How Policy Happens: Understanding the decisions that shape the education system. After over a decade of work in education policy it's my attempt to take a step back, and to open up the black box of policy making.
I think policy making can be very opaque, which makes it hard - and quite frustrating - when decisions land, with limited rhyme or reason. As part of the book I'm hoping to combine anecdotes from the corridors of Westminster, with the best that public policy analysis, sociology and political theory can bring to the table in order to increase people's understanding of what goes on. In the process, I'm hoping that will give them a bit of agency when it comes to influencing system level decisions.
How has your career to date led to this?
I've been in the education and youth sector most of my life. I started off as a youth worker, here in Cambridge, before wanting to see things from the perspective of schools, which led to me becoming a teacher in North West London. However, I'd always been interested in politics and sociology, so it was perhaps inevitable that I'd get increasingly interested in what was going on at a system level, and how decisions there shaped my pupils' lives. That's why I left the classroom and set up a 'think and action tank' - The Centre for Education and Youth, where I spent a decade providing the evidence policy makers and practitioners needed, in order to better support Young People on the Margins (which is the title of my last book.) I'm hoping that this new book will bring the whole of that journey together!
What one thing would you most want someone to learn from what you’ve done or are doing now?
I've always argued that society as a whole needs to step up and do everything it can to ensure that all children and young people can make a fulfilling transition to adulthood. What I've learned, looking at this from lots of different different angles, is that we can't leave such a complex, but crucial job down to families on their own, nor just to schools, nor to an increasingly complicated ecosystem of charities and third sector organisations that are trying to mend the cracks in our system.
What do you think of Jesus College and the Intellectual Forum?
I'm incredibly excited to be joining such a vibrant, interdisciplinary network at the heart of an academic community. The IF brings together people from such a range of perspectives and with so many different forms of expertise - and Jesus College has got to be the nicest college in Cambridge (having lived in the City most of my life, I feel well placed to judge this!) Every time I sit down to work in the college, whether in the library or college bar I feel part of an incredibly rich history of academic endeavour. It's genuinely inspiring!
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