Patrick is the Associate Dean at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. He has published on assessment and evaluation topics that include competency development, language proficiency, industrial literacy, school literacy and numeracy profile development, professional standards portfolio assessment and online assessment and calibration. He was awarded the John Smythe medal for excellence in research for his work on profiling literacy development and his work on profile reporting was identified in the annual 1996 yearbook of the American Society for Curriculum Development in Washington as world's best practice.

He is a project team leader for UNESCO in southern Africa, and was awarded, in 2005, a UNESCO Research Medal by the Ministers of Education from southern African nations. Patrick is a World Bank consultant in Vietnam and China, leading national and international teams in studies of literacy and numeracy assessment and has developed a system of teacher assessment recently signed into law by the Vietnam Government to be applied to more than 380,000 teachers and to be replicated in China. His work currently focuses on item response modelling applications in interpretive frameworks for criterion referenced performance and developmental competence assessment.