He was educated at Christ's Hospital, then an all-boys charity school in Southwater, Sussex.
[1] He studied Literae Humaniores at The Queen's College, Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree.
[1][2] From 1977 to 1978, he was also a fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, and its director of studies in classics and philosophy.
[1] Wanting to move from a philosophy specialist to a classicist, Barker joined the Classics Department of the University of Otago in 1992.
[3] He gave the inaugural Martin West Memorial Lecture at the University of Oxford in March 2017; his lecture was titled "Migrating musical myths: the case of Euripides and the Libyan lotos".