Gemma Moss.

Harvey Goldstein, who has died of Covid-19 at the age of 80, has left a formidable legacy from his work, both as a statistician and as a campaigner for more careful scrutiny of assessment data in education – whose misuse he consistently queried.

Harvey’s career included posts at the UCL Institute of Child Health (ICH); as Professor of Statistical Methods, Institute of Education (IOE), University of London, 1977 – 2004; and as Professor of Social Statistics at the School of Education, University of Bristol, 2005-2020, where he remained working right up until his death.

He represented a rare combination of statistical insight, rigour and inventiveness, coupled with a fierce desire to call out the abuse of data in public debate and broaden conceptions of what evidence-informed policy should really look like. In all these ways (more…)