Colin Mills (educationalist)

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Colin Mills (born 6 January 1951 in Chester, Cheshire) is a British educationalist and writer who focuses on children’s literature, literacy and education policy. He is the son of actor John Channell Mills and the brother of comedian and writer Bob Mills.

Education
Mills trained as a teacher at Chester College, earning a Cert Ed in 1973. He then gained a Bachelor of Education with honors from the University of Liverpool in 1974 (winning the Morrell Memorial Prize) and completed a Master of Arts in Education at the University of London Institute of Education in 1977 with distinction.

Career
Mills taught in schools in Cheshire and London and worked as an advisory teacher and researcher from 1972 to 1989. He has held university positions at Exeter, Central England, and Worcester (1989–2007). Since September 2007 he has been at the University of Manchester as a Senior Teaching Fellow, and after semi-retiring in 2014 he became an Honorary Teaching Fellow. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at Newman University, Birmingham, and a visiting scholar at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto.

Publications
Mills has written extensively on children’s literacy and literature. Notable works include Language and Literacy in the Primary School (1988, with Margaret Meek) and Connecting, Creating: new ideas in teaching writing (2005, with Sue Ellis). He has contributed to major reference works such as The Routledge Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (2003) and The International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (2007). His later work focuses on education policy and research, including Education Policy Research (2014, with Helen Gunter and David Hall) and Consultants and Consultancy: the Case of Education (2017, with Helen Gunter). Upcoming projects include a book on the marketisation of literacy in English primary schooling and an intellectual biography of Margaret Meek Spencer, who influenced him as supervisor, mentor and collaborator in the 1980s and 1990s.