Projects

• I was a founding Director of a Free School, the Reach Academy Feltham, which will be a small, all-through school in one of the UK’s most deprived Boroughs.  Modeled in part on the US charter school network KIPP it aims to afford all children the opportunity to succeed academically.

•  In 2011 I was appointed editor of Teach First’s 10th anniversary policy publication, leading a research team to produce a dissertation on the causes and policy remedies of the inequalities in the British education system.

• In November 2007 I co-authored, with Max Haimendorf, a Teach First education policy paper presented to the House of Lords and the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit.  Our chapter on small schools led much of the press coverage, for example in the Observer here, and was reprinted by both Forum and Human Scale Education.  Our work preceded the then Conservative opposition’s pronouncements in favour of small learning communities, but also anticipated the way the debate would move, offering a more nuanced recommendation that schools should not just be smaller but ‘adopt the characteristics of smallness’.

• In response to the success of our paper, Max and I set up a working group to explore how a small school might  function in practice. Led by Max some of this thinking has been applied at King Solomon Academy.