Robert is a history teacher and honorary research fellow at the think tank Civitas. He is the author of Progressively Worse: The Burden of Bad Ideas in British Schools, a book about the history of teaching methods from the 1960s to today, and Playing the Game: The enduring influence of the preferred Ofsted teaching style, a report into Ofsted inspections. Having studied history at the University of Cambridge and the University of Pennsylvania, Robert became a teacher through the Teach First programme. He has written on education for Standpoint magazine, Demos Quarterly, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, sometimes under the pen-name Matthew Hunter.