Dr Salya Akhtar
Salya is an Assistant Lecturer within the Department of Education, working across the Children, Youth and Community Cluster. She teaches across a range of education related courses, drawing on extensive experience as a secondary English teacher and her expertise in higher education teaching, teacher education and educational research.
Salya holds a PGCE PCET with QTLS and an MA in Education. Her teaching career spans offender education, and almost a decade of secondary English teaching across Birmingham and the Black Country. Her MA research explored teachers’ experiences of a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum in a diverse secondary school, developing her ongoing interests in curriculum, teacher professional identities and the role of teacher voice in educational decision-making.
In 2026, Salya was awarded her PhD in Education, Listening Differently: Granular Exclusions of Marginalised Early Career Teachers. She explored the professional identities and experiences of marginalised Early Career Teachers, with a particular focus on how exclusion can operate through everyday educational practices. Her current research interests centre on marginalised bodies within education settings, with particular interests in post-qualitative theory and methodologies, decolonisation, Black feminist thought and affect theory.