George Leckie is a Professor of Social Statistics and Co-Director of the Centre for Multilevel Modelling at the School of Education, University of Bristol, UK.

His substantive interests focus on design, analysis, and communication issues surrounding school performance measures and league tables, especially the use of value-added models for estimating school effects on student achievement for accountability and choice purposes. His methodological interests are in the development and application and of multilevel and related models to analyse educational and other complex cross-sectional and longitudinal sources of data.

George has published his substantial body of substantive and methodological research across a broad range of journals, including: Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice; British Educational Research Journal; Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics; Journal of Educational Measurement; Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A; and Journal of Statistical Software. He has also helped to train education and other social scientists in advanced quantitative methods via over 50 multilevel modelling short courses across UK, Europe, Australia and US.

He was awarded the Frances Wood Medal in the Royal Statistical Society’s 2017 honours for these contributions to Social Statistics, especially his school league table and multilevel modelling research.

He is currently principal investigator on an ESRC standard grant on new school league table research: How should we measure school performance and hold schools accountable? A study of competing statistical methods and how they compare to Progress 8. This work builds on that carried out on his previous ESRC Future Research Leaders grant and as co-investigator on various Centre for Multilevel Modelling ESRC grants.