His consultancy work has included the OECD, UNESCO, the International Labour Organisation, the Bertelsmann Foundation, the European Commission and the Education Bureau in Hong Kong. More recently in his role as Project Director of the Centre for Commonwealth Education he has, in collaboration with the University of Cape Coast, helped embed leadership for learning in government policy in Ghana.
He was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire) for services to education in 1997 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 2009. He has authored and co-authored 20 books in education, including most recently A Common Wealth of Learning (Routledge, 2013) with Mike Younger and Learning in and out of School: the selected works of John MacBeath (Routledge, 2012)