I’ve worked in learning and education for nearly twenty years, although the shape of that work has changed quite a lot along the way.
Where I started
I started as a primary teacher and moved into school leadership within five years. I loved teaching, but I was always interested in the bigger question around it too: why some ideas make their way into classrooms and change what people actually do, while others look excellent on paper and disappear somewhere between training, planning and Tuesday afternoon.
In 2015 I joined Teach First, initially working directly with new teachers and schools across the East of England. Over the following twelve years my work widened considerably. I moved through regional and national programme leadership, led Early Years and Primary work, managed national NPQ programmes, spent time in the CEO office during a major organisational transition and eventually became Head of Delivery.
Different seats
That progression meant I ended up seeing learning and education from quite a few different seats.
I have been the teacher expected to make something work with thirty children in front of me. I have coached teachers and supported schools. I have led teams responsible for delivery across large regions and national programmes, worked with the DfE and university partners, managed budgets and contracts, dealt with regulatory and governance questions, worked alongside trustees and executive leaders, and led people through changes they were not always especially pleased about.
Some of my career has been very visibly about learning. A lot of it has actually been about all the conditions around learning that decide whether it succeeds: people, systems, quality, data, culture, capacity, money, communication and the occasional situation where there simply is not a perfect answer and somebody needs to make a decision.
Work I’m proud of
I have been lucky enough to do some work I’m very proud of. In East Anglia, trainee retention was roughly 94%, the highest nationally, for three consecutive years while I led programme delivery. I later led a cross-functional redesign of Teach First’s ITT Board governance, strengthening evidence standards, audit trails and decision-making across legal, compliance and programme teams; executive leaders reported a material reduction in organisational risk within eight weeks. In my final year at Teach First, I led the redesign of Summer Institute and the work behind the 2026 National Gathering, which brought more than 1,300 new teachers together in Newcastle.
Some of the work that shaped me most is less obvious from the outside. I took over a team that was in real cultural difficulty and helped rebuild it into one that was performing strongly again. I led changes to governance where the existing process was exposing the organisation to risk. I worked in the CEO office through a period of major transition, helped senior teams turn priorities into something people could actually act on, and spent years learning how to get things done across organisations where the people you need rarely all report to you.
The feedback I value most from colleagues is not really about individual projects. Across different roles and different years, people have described me as warm, clear, direct, calm under pressure, detailed, energetic and good at getting people moving without pretending that difficult things are easy. That feels recognisable to me.
How I work
I like ideas, probably too many of them, but I have never been especially interested in leaving them as ideas. I like making something, putting it in front of real people and finding out whether it works. I tend to move quickly, I am comfortable changing my mind when reality gives me better information, and I would generally rather make a sensible first version and learn from it than spend three weeks discussing the theoretically perfect one.
Learning itself has always sat underneath that. Long before I knew the formal language of deliberate practice or learning transfer, the way I taught and developed teachers relied heavily on modelling, rehearsal, feedback and trying again. I remain fascinated by the distance between understanding something and being able to do it well when the situation becomes messy.
What I’m building now
That question now appears in several different parts of my work. Conversation Coach gives people somewhere to practise under pressure before it matters, so the first time they deal with the pushback, silence or emotion of a difficult conversation is not necessarily when the stakes are real. With Coglet, we’re building training and CPD for people working with and caring for children across early years, primary and wider care settings, including fostering, wraparound and holiday provision, with the same interest in whether somebody can recognise what matters and make a good judgement once the course is finished. At Turing College / Boom Training, I’m beginning a new chapter in adult learning and applied AI, where many of the same questions about practice, confidence and real capability are becoming increasingly important.
I am also learning what it means to build businesses after spending most of my career inside established organisations. I am not an entrepreneurship expert and have no desire to pretend otherwise, but I am enjoying the process of taking things I know well, testing whether they solve a problem somebody genuinely cares about, and then working out how to make them useful enough to earn their place.
Background
I’m a qualified teacher with a PGCE and MEd from Cambridge, and I’m a school governor, focusing on Early Years. Education remains very much my professional home, even as the ways I work within it become broader.
These days that means a mixture of employment, products, businesses, learning, AI, difficult conversations and whatever I am building next. The common thread is fairly simple: I want good ideas to become useful things that work for real people.