Neil Mercer is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, Director of Oracy Cambridge: the Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication, a Life Fellow of the Cambridge college Hughes Hall, an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Before he joined Cambridge, he was Professor of Language and Communications at the Open University. He grew up in the Lake District and is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Cumbria. As a psychologist whose research has focused on the development of children’s spoken language and reasoning abilities and teachers’ role in that development, he has worked extensively and internationally with teachers, researchers and educational policy makers.

In 2019 he was given the Oevre Award by the European Association for Research into Learning and Instruction for outstanding contributions to educational research; and in 2021 he was awarded the John Nisbet Fellowship by the British Educational Research Association. His books include Words and Minds, Exploring Talk in School, Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking, Interthinking: putting talk to work and Language and the Joint Creation of Knowledge; and he was co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education.
https://www.hughes.cam.ac.uk/academic/our-people/seniors-members/neil-mercer/