After leaving university, Benn spent several years working at the National Council for Civil Liberties, as an assistant to Patricia Hewitt, later Secretary of State for Health in Tony Blair's government, and then as a researcher at the Open University, under Professor Stuart Hall,[2] working on deaths in custody.
Subsequently, she has written for other publications, including The Guardian, The London Review of Books and Marxism Today.
[2] In 1998 Jonathan Cape published Benn's Madonna and Child: towards a modern politics of motherhood which caused some controversy.
In 2006, with Fiona Millar, she wrote a pamphlet entitled A Comprehensive Future: Quality and Equality for All our Children, which was launched at the House of Commons in January 2006 at a meeting addressed by the former leader of the Labour Party Neil Kinnock and a former Secretary of State for Education Estelle Morris.
[7] In 2012, Benn won the Fred and Anne Jarvis Award, presented by the National Union of Teachers for her campaigning and work for the cause of comprehensive education.