Writing
Essays on education, leadership, and strategy
Written to be argued with, not simply read: pieces drawn from the questions that recur across my advisory work.
More foundational than any of these essays, my educational philosophy sets out what I believe schools are for.
Selected
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The right leader. The right school. The right time?
The success of a leadership appointment isn't only about who you hire. It also needs to be the right moment in the school's development for them to thrive. On the phases a school moves through, what each asks of its leaders, and why timing is the variable hiring conversations miss.
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When heritage schools go international, style travels easily. Substance doesn't.
A name and a crest reproduce frictionlessly. What it actually feels like to be educated at a school does not. On the gap between the two, and what protects against dilution.
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AI-personalised learning will create students who have never lost an argument. That's a problem.
AI personalisation is exceptionally good at calibrating content to the individual. It is far less suited to the parts of learning that require other people, and that is where intellectual formation actually happens.
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A little data literacy goes a long way... sometimes too far.
The conversation about data literacy in schools almost always assumes the problem is scarcity. More often it is the opposite: just enough knowledge to be confident, and not enough to be right.
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Quality assurance should be done with school teams, not to them
Group quality assurance can deliver real insight, yet the team that carries its weight rarely feels the benefit. On the difference between QA done to a school and QA done with it, and why serving the people in the building first protects the commercial interest better than the reverse.
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Reality TV taught me something about accountability
Acknowledgement and apology tell people you understand what happened. Ownership requires action; accountability means accepting the consequences. On the difference, and why organisations so often reward performance over substance when it's time for a mea culpa.
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What Radical Candor taught me about mutual intelligibility
Communication norms vary across cultures, teams, and individuals, but the gap between what is said and what is thought is near-universal. On using a feedback framework not as a rulebook but as a neutral language for naming how we actually talk to each other.
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A provocation is not a position
Speaking last protects independent thinking but carries its own cost. On a sharper way to put an idea into the room: not as a question or a suggestion, but as a provocation.
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A series
Using AI well in professional practice
Three articles on what it actually means to use AI well in a professional context: the problem of flattened voice, the work of teaching a tool to sound like you, and the conversation that does the real thinking.
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Part One
AI and the flattening of professional voice
What gives away an AI-generated response, and why a homogenised professional voice carries a real cost to the individuals and organisations that depend on clear thinking.
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Part Two
Know thyself: what I learned from teaching AI to sound like me
Getting AI close enough to your own style turns out to be an exercise in self-knowledge: you cannot instruct it in how you write until you understand how you write.
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Part Three
AI as a sparring partner: why the conversation matters as much as the initial prompt
The part that matters most is not the prompt but what follows it. On using AI to pressure-test thinking rather than to produce answers.
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Tell me what you think
These essays are written to be argued with. I post new pieces on LinkedIn as they're written, and I genuinely want to know what you make of them: what lands, what doesn't, where you'd push back.