Jonty Leese

Associate Professor

Jonty has been involved in education in the West Midlands for over 25 years. An Associate Professor at the Centre for Teacher Education, he trained at Warwick, taught in local state schools for eleven years, and has now been part of CTE for over a decade — bringing a practitioner's grounding to everything he does.

He leads the Computer Science PGCE and serves as Course Lead for the iQTS and PGCEi international routes, working nationally and internationally across distance, blended, and face-to-face models of teacher education. He has led projects around social mobility, international programmes, and preparing for teaching — including co-designing a MOOC on the FutureLearn platform to prepare student teachers for their training year — and sits on a number of national committees and steering groups. A commitment to social justice runs through this work: widening who gets to teach, and who gets to thrive, in Computer Science classrooms.

Jonty works through building strong relationships in a collaborative culture, and is passionate about developing Computer Science trainees into the best they can become — teachers with strong subject knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge, and the curiosity and creativity to keep questioning how their subject is best taught. He has presented to international audiences on Technology Enhanced Learning and writes regularly for Hello World magazine (Raspberry Pi Foundation).

His research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and teacher development, exploring how student teachers can develop calibrated, critical trust in AI systems they cannot fully audit — with an eye on the futurology of education and a commitment to teacher professionalism over automation. He remains fascinated by the etymology of Computer Science terms and how semantic waves can enhance student learning.

His family are firmly rooted in the local education community: his three children attend local state schools and his wife teaches in a primary school in Bedworth.