Advisory & consultancy
International school leaders
Simultaneously maintaining a clear big-picture vision and directing day-to-day practice is a defining challenge of senior leadership in international schools. Closing the gap between the two is one of the most important jobs a principal has, and it remains difficult regardless of experience.
But the last thing any leader wants is someone being brought in to tell them what to do or criticise their work.
For school leaders and their teams, I am a thinking partner and critical friend: someone who has navigated the same pressures, brings alternative perspectives, and helps develop and consolidate their thinking.
The areas below are where my experience runs deepest, though years in senior leadership have exposed me to every aspect of running schools.
Areas of expertise
Vision and practice
- aligning strategy, systems and practice
- balancing educational ambition with commercial and operational reality
- school development planning and evaluation
- stakeholder and partner engagement
- educational quality assurance
Academic programmes
- curriculum design and qualification frameworks
- teaching, learning and assessment
- academic enrichment and co-curricular provision
- university and careers guidance
The team
- recruitment and selection of school leaders and teaching staff
- leadership structures and management systems
- personal and professional development
- appraisal and performance management
Selected essays
Written from the same side of the desk. You can find more of my thinking on the writing page.
Espousing the benefits of a new approach isn't enough. First, you need to unpick the old one.
Change initiatives are usually introduced by the people most convinced of their merits, so they arrive as a pitch: the evidence, the benefits, the pilot that worked. The staff who leave the INSET unconvinced are rarely being difficult. More often they hold an unaddressed preconception or face an unacknowledged external pressure. A discussion of why change stalls, what it takes to overcome the inertia, and why some groundwork is needed before schools rethink assessment for AI.
Read →A little data literacy goes a long way... sometimes too far.
After every standardised test, reporting cycle and results season, someone produces a complex spreadsheet and, if you're lucky, some nuanced commentary on the data. More often than not, someone more senior and further from the detail decides what the numbers mean for students, departments and individual teachers. They might have had a single day of data training, bought from whichever provider pitched most persuasively. More likely, they have had none at all, but back their experience and intuition. In either case, they are probably acting with more confidence than they should. What CAT4's own technical report says about its margin of error, what Dunning and Kruger actually found (not what most of us, me included, assumed), and when to defer to expertise rather than back yourself.
Read →When a school policy isn't followed, look at the document before blaming the staff
Vague policy statements invite misinterpretation, overly rigid frameworks breed workarounds, and a lack of documentation forces improvisation. Each of these problems puts a colleague in a position to fail and exposes the school to reputational, financial and even legal risks, all of them avoidable. How I split a policy into four distinct but interconnected parts, and capture the institutional memory that would otherwise be lost when key staff move on.
Read →A provocation is not a position
The most senior voice in a room tends to set the ceiling for what gets said after it, which is why leaders are so often advised to speak last. But a conversation allowed to run a long way in the wrong direction is expensive too, and correcting it at the end is harder on whoever led it there. A lesson I learned from a CEO: speak-first-or-hold-back is a false dichotomy if leaders frame their comments as provocations rather than suggestions or positions.
Read →
Start the conversation
Every engagement begins with a conversation to help me understand your context and what you wish to achieve. From there, we can discuss what I can contribute and whether there's potential for a partnership.