Kimberley Hill is an Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Northampton. She has 15 years of teaching experience and has long worked to create safer night-time economies. Kimberley’s critically reflexive teaching practice promotes active student engagement within applied, problem-based workshops.
An Advance HE Senior Fellow, her classes provide students with opportunities to apply psychological knowledge to their own lives, becoming reflective and psychologically literate partners dedicated to tackling social injustice. Kimberley’s PhD established local on-licensed premise partnerships, providing guidelines for increasing student safety. She has since been dedicated to transforming university prevention responses for tackling gender-based violence, which has informed HE and government recommendations.
Kimberley co-led one of the first curriculum-embedded consent campaigns to create conversations about consent on campus. She has since created student-led consent activities for educators to take sensitive subjects into classrooms. Kimberley’s research provides some of the earliest insights into students’ lived experiences of gender-based violence, including prevalence data, consent misunderstandings and barriers to disclosure.
Dedicated to engaging students as partners, Kimberley used these findings to inform a student-led HEFCE Catalyst-funded project which highlighted student experiences and limited higher education policies and processes, as well as staff and university manager experiences. She has since worked with universities to implement recommendations and model these approaches. This involves advising on new higher education policies, support/report processes, best practice guidance and more. She has also worked with an innovative cross-university group to lead a #NeverOK Campaign for Change, while reviewing implemented processes and policies.
Dedicated to increasing access into education, as part of her National STEM Ambassador role Kimberley trains students as positive role models to take consent conversations into schools. She also created key partnerships with the police, local charities (eg Suzy Lamplugh Trust) and other organisations, transforming practice through Exchange of Practice events and a recent Home Office-funded Community Safety Partnership, impacting county-wide action. Kimberley shares best practice through her national and international professional body work, exchanging global practice through conferences and events she has organised. She has also implemented mentoring frameworks and co-created the first European-wide early career prevention support network.