Professor Helen Gunter's main research interest is in the modernisation of education as policy and practice at national and local levels. This has two strands to it:
- how teachers, teaching, learners and learning are being structured through performance management systems, and more recently remodelling;
- how knowledge production within the field of educational leadership has sustained or challenged these policy strategies.
She is particularly interested in using Bourdieus tools of field, habitus and capital to describe, understand, and explain modernisation.
She has been involved in a range of projects on policy change in education and how these developments are being handled, and in particular now interventions in practice support learning and learners. In addition to this she has led major projects on public policy and knowledge in the field of educational leadership.