Dave Hill (professor)

David Stanley Hill (born 10 October 1945) is a British Marxist politician, academic and educational activist.

He is Research Professor (Emeritus) in Education at Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, England, and also visiting professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and in the Social Policy Research Centre at Middlesex University, London.

In 1961, Dave Hill joined the Labour Party and became Chair of Brighton Young Socialists.

Between 1967 and 1969, Hill taught at Stockwell Manor Comprehensive School.

He was an elected Labour Party councillor for East Sussex County Council and Brighton Borough Council in the 1970s and 1980s and has been a candidate in thirteen local, national and European elections since 1972, most recently as Parliamentary Candidate in Hove and Portslade in the 2015 general election for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC).

In Britain, he is currently a member of the Labour Left Alliance, the Socialist Labour Network, and the Campaign for a New Workers Party.

Dave Hill was brought up in a working-class family from the East End of London.

His mother was a dressmaker and his father, a cabinet maker and carpenter.

Hill became the first in his family to go to a grammar school; he attended Westlain Grammar School in Brighton.

Hill studied Politics and Modern History at Manchester University and subsequently gained master's degrees, one in politics and another in Education at the University of Sussex and a PhD at the London University Institute of Education under the supervision of Geoff Whitty.

During the late 1970s and the early 1980s, he worked as a part-time photo-journalist for some of the Left Press in Britain, covering elections in Portugal, Spain, and France for New Socialist, Labour Weekly and Tribune.

From 1972, he taught in higher education, Bognor Regis College of Education which became part of West Sussex Institute of Higher Education (now the University of Chichester), mainly part-time because of his responsibilities as trade union representative and as an elected councillor.

He also taught prisoners, adult education tutors, youth workers, and in Thorney Island Refugee Camp for Vietnamese boat people.

He subsequently developed and led for five years the Crawley Bachelor of Education Degree for mature and nonstandard entry students.

He was also a Brighton Borough Councillor during 1975–76 and again during 1979–83.

From the beginning of the Thatcher years, Hill became more radicalized and opposed what he saw as the increasingly rightward drift in the local and national Labour Party.

In the 1979 and 1987 parliamentary elections, he was the Labour parliamentary candidate for Brighton Pavilion, but was defeated both times by Julian Amery, the Conservative Member of Parliament.

During the 1979 local elections he scored the highest vote ever recorded for a Labour candidate in Brighton.

As a Labour Party member, Hill was an elected East Sussex County Councillor between 1981–1989 and in the mid-1980s, became Labour Group Leader on East Sussex County Council.

In 1988, Hill announced he was leaving Labour electoral politics.

In 1989, Hill set up the independent-left research unit, the Institute for Education Policy Studies and co-founded and chaired the Hillcole Group of Radical Left Educators between 1989 and 2001.

Affiliated writers and academics sustained Marxist and socialist educational analysis and policy formulation in Britain, through its publications of two books and thirteen booklets, published by Tufnell Press between 1990 and 2002.

It included Caroline Benn Mike Cole, Glenn Rikowski and for the first few years, Gaby Weiner and Stephen Ball.

It also included some activists from the Socialist Teachers Alliance.

In his long career he has taught in London's East End, at Tower Hamlets College in 1996–1997, and after that at the University of Northampton in between 1997 and 2010, where he was Professor of Education Policy.

In 2005, after 44 years of active membership, he left the Labour Party and joined the International Socialist Group (which later merged into Socialist Resistance), and the Respect Party.

Hill contested the 2009 European election for the left-wing electoral alliance, No to EU – Yes to Democracy as lead candidate for the South East Region of England.

Hill contested the 2010 General Election as the candidate for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition in the Brighton Kemptown Constituency, and in the 2015 General Election he fought the Hove and Portslade Constituency again for the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition.

He taught at Middlesex University between 2010 and 2012.

Between 2012 and 2016 he was research professor of education at Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, England, and pays regular visits to Athens, Greece, and Ankara, Turkey.

While on trade union and Left demonstrations he has been teargassed in Athens and Ankara.

He left Socialist Resistance in 2014 and joined the Independent Socialist Network, an organisation within the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), for whom he has fought local and parliamentary elections, and was a member of Left Unity.

He unsuccessfully applied to rejoin the Labour Party in July 2016 as part of the influx of socialists into the Labour Party to support the left-wing leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and, after an appeal, was re-admitted to Labour in 2018.

He is now a member of the National Organising Group of the Labour Left Alliance, of the Socialist Labour Network, and the Campaign for a Mass Workers Party.

He is visiting professor of education at the National and the Kapodistrian University of Athens, and has held visiting professor positions at Middlesex University and the University of Limerick, Ireland He was made redundant from Anglia Ruskin University in April 2016 and is now emeritus Professor of Education Research there.

From March 2017, he was visiting professor with the Social Policy Research Centre at Middlesex University for a three-year term.

He briefly rejoined from 2018 to 2020 to support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party.

Following the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party in October 2020, Dave Hill once again resigned from the Labour Party.

In November 2020, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos de Educación Inclusiva | CELEI |, Santiago, Chile.

He is also a Research Fellow of the Research Center of Contemporary China at Wuhan University, Hubei, China; Fellow of the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE), Amsterdam, the Netherlands