Dr Jo Bentham

Jo has been a business and economics teacher for over 35 years and is currently at Haberdashers’ Adams in Shropshire. She was involved in setting up the PGCE course at Staffordshire University and was a mentor for twenty years. Jo’s academic and practical experience has enabled her to make a significant contribution to economics and business education over the years.

Following a first degree in European Business (Economics and German) Jo worked as a business analyst for Dun and Bradstreet. Following a PGCE in Business and Economics, she taught in Birmingham, and Staffordshire for over thirty years. She has a M.A in Education and Industry from the University of Warwick, and a PhD from the University of Birmingham.

 She has worked with the University of Staffordshire on a Best Practice Research Scholarship, and also worked with the EBEA on developing the GCSE Bitesize series of revision activities in conjunction with the BBC.  She has been involved with the Nuffield Foundation Curriculum Centre on projects which lead to the Nuffield A Level and GCSE in Business and Economics, as well as participating in a working group which focused on the role of Citizenship in the secondary curriculum and developed materials to support teachers with the delivery of citizenship.  She has contributed to articles in ‘The Curriculum Journal’, ‘Educational Review’, and the EBEA’s ‘Teaching Business and Economics’ journal.  More recently she authored a chapter on ‘The teacher as researcher’ in ‘Learning to teach Business in the Secondary School – A Companion to School Experience’ (Pascall (ed), 2022).

Her professional interests are in improving the written literacy of students and also the ways in which schools can be part of a research informed community. Her subject interests focus on business strategy and the reasoning which informs decision making.  She has also been an A Level examiner, a teacher union representative, and a member of a QCA consulting group, both for a level Business and Economics as well as Critical Thinking.