Professor Jeff Bale
Chair of the Academic Assurance Committee
Summary
Jeff has spent his entire career in higher education. He was an undergraduate student at the University of Newcastle where, after a sabbatical year as President of the Students' Union, he achieved a BSc Agricultural Zoology (1st) in 1973. He subsequently achieved a PhD in the area of insect ecophysiology from the same university in 1977 and was then awarded the Lord Adams Fellowship at Newcastle for studies on soil pest species.
Jeff worked as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in the Department of Pure and Applied Zoology, University of Leeds between 1979 and 1992. He was a Nuffield Science Research Fellow at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1988.
Jeff was appointed Professor of Environmental Biology at the University of Birmingham in 1992, since then he has held a succession of roles, including Director of Quality Assurance and Enhancement for the College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education and the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education. He was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Rennes in 2007. Jeff retired from the University of Birmingham in 2016.
He has held a number of external positions including:
- External examiner for undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at 13 UK universities
- Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) subject specialist reviewer for Biosciences and then an institutional-level reviewer through the successive QAA Institutional Audit, Institutional Reviews in England and Northern Ireland (IRENI) and Higher Education Review (HER) processes
- A member of the Grade Point Average (GPA) Advisory and Implementation Groups
- A panel member of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) exercise
- A member of the Government's Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE)
Jeff served as an elected academic member of Council at the University of Birmingham before becoming an ex-officio member upon his appointment as Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education.
Jeff was a member of the Board of Governors of Haybridge High School for over 15 years. He is currently the Chair of the Board of Governors at the University of Birmingham School and a Member of the Four Stones Multi-academy Trust.
Jeff is Chair of the Academic Assurance Committee.
Period of office: August 2017 – July 2025
