Ms Kimberly Safford

I am an Honorary Associate of the Open University, formerly Senior Lecturer in Education.

I support the OU’s mission to promote adult learning across all ages and stages in the UK and internationally, through research, learning design, course authoring, Open Educational Resource creation, postgraduate supervision, monitoring and evaluation, You can see my  publications in Open Research Online.

I am a member of the British Council / Open University partnership research project ‘EMEGen’ that explores how English as the medium of school instruction impacts on gender equity in low and middle-income countries.

I work with TPD@Scale Coalition for the Global South. We are developing a CPD resource for school leaders on Improvement Science. Recently we published a suite of courses in OpenLearnCreate on scaling teacher professional development that has been studied by 14 country teams in a GPE-KIX learning cycle.  

I am a Climate Ambassador for the OU, and educational advisor to Climate Change All Change, an exciting cross-curricular creative programme where primary school children and designers co-create solutions to the climate crisis.   

I am the advisor for a new Routledge open research collection on Education, Equity and Equality. 

In the OU Primary Education Studies team, I co-authored the course 'Comparative and international studies in primary education' and the textbook 'Learning and Teaching Around the World' (Routledge). I co-developed the highly-regarded OU International Development and Teacher Education programmes: the Sierra Leone Learning Assistant Programme and TESS India.

For USAID, I recently evaluated the scaling and sustainability of RTI’s Becoming a Learning Detective teacher training within All Children Reading in the Philippines (ACR-Philippines). I also supported World Reader in Ghana to develop an at-scale teacher development course on using digital books in the classroom. 

Before coming to the OU, I was Senior Lecturer in Primary English Education at Roehampton University, and research officer for the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE).  I was a primary school teacher in London. In a previous career, I worked for 20 years as a radio and television journalist in San Francisco, New York and London.