She gained a Bachelor in English Literature from Trinity College Dublin, an Master of Arts in Education from the University of Ulster at Coleraine, and a Doctor of Philosophy in the teaching of English in secondary schools from Bristol University in 1980.
After graduation, she worked as an English lecturer for eight years, first in Ireland, where she was also an education writer for the Irish Times, and then at Bristol Polytechnic. In 1979 she became Education Correspondent for the magazine New Society, and moved to the same position at The Sunday Times in 1987. She became Assistant Editor of the Times Educational Supplement (TES) in 1990.
She returned to the Times Educational Supplement as Editor in 1997 and remained until 2000, when ill health forced her to resign.
In three-and-a-half years she had modernised and expanded the paper, with new magazine sections appealing to the women who now predominated in education. She died of breast cancer at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London in September 2003, aged 56.
