2009: Tim Cain, University of Southampton

Tim Cain has taught children and adults from 5-19. From 1977-91 he taught music in three Secondary schools and was Head of Music in two of them, before moving to La Sainte Union College, where he lectured in teacher education. From 1997-2001 he enjoyed a peripatetic career, lecturing in universities on Mondays to Wednesdays, and teaching music in a Secondary school on Thursdays and Fridays. He then became the course leader for the KS2/3 PGCE music course at Bath Spa University and in 2003 he was appointed to lead the PGCE music course in Secondary music at the University of Southampton

He completed a PhD under the supervision of Helen Simons, in Initial Teacher Education mentoring. His work in this field has been presented to conferences in Italy, Holland, Spain, Croatia and Slovenia, and he was a member of the Comenius project, Mentoring in Teacher Education, which was funded by the European Union.

Tim subsequently became involved in educational action research (i.e. research by practitioners) and particularly on practitioner research in music education. He has led a one-year project for educational advisers at the Education and Teacher Training Agency of Croatia (ETTA) and also leads the Southampton Music Action Research Project. He believes strongly in the potential of practitioner research, not only to change practice, but also to generate useful research findings.