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Nick has been Deputy General Secretary of NAHT since September 2016. Prior to this, he ran his own successful education consultancy. Having started his career as a primary teacher Nick has over twenty-five years’ experience of public sector delivery in central government, local government and schools. For ten years, as a Senior Civil Servant, he shaped policy and transformed delivery in some of the most high-profile, high-priority areas in Government, including the Home Office – where he led the Anti-Social Behaviour and Crime Prevention Unit; the Training and Development Agency for Schools – as Director of School Workforce Remodelling and at Ofsted, leading thematic and subject inspection and external communications. As Deputy General Secretary at NAHT, Nick leads the policy and research, press and media and organising and campaigns teams.

Nick is also a member of Camden’s Education Strategy Board, which is developing Camden’s new education strategy, Building Back Stronger.

Our ninth Camden Conversation will be led by Dr Karen Edge, Reader in Educational Leadership at UCL Institute of Education (IOE) and UCL’s Pro-Vice Provost (International) from 2016-19.

Karen has conducted research in over 30 countries and is currently leading a 7-country study of teacher motivation. Karen recently completed the Global City Leaders Project which worked with Generation X (under 45-year-old) school leaders in London, New York City and Toronto. Karen is also preparing two books on Generation X leaders (Routledge) and City-based education policy contexts and the influence on school leaders (Bloomsbury).

She sits on ESRC (UK) and Danish Research Review Panels and the Advisory Panel for International School Leadership Principals in Ontario. She is Past Editor-in-Chief of Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability (EAEA) and a current Editorial Board Member for EAEA, School Leadership and Management and Leadership and Policy in Schools.

Prior to joining the IOE, Karen briefly served as Senior Policy Advisor to the Minister of Education in Ontario, Canada. Karen also worked as consultant/researcher at the World Bank in Washington, DC and Principal of Edge Strategy Group, a small social research-consulting firm. She completed her PhD in knowledge management and educational reform at the Ontario Institute of Education/University of Toronto. Karen is a highly sought after keynote speaker. She is known for being able to blend theory and practice with insight and humour.

Our eighth Camden Conversation will be led by Professor Becky Francis, Chief Executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, with the title Evidence for Recovery . It’s due to take place on Wednesday 19 May 2021 between 4pm-5pm.

Professor Becky Francis (FAcSS, PhD) is Chief Executive Officer of the Education Endowment Foundation. She was previously Director of the UCL Institute of Education (IOE), which is ranked #1 in the world for education in the international QS rankings. Her prior roles include Professor of Education and Social Justice at King’s College London, Director of Education at the RSA and Standing Advisor to the Parliamentary Education Select Committee.

Throughout her career, Becky has sought to maximise the impact of academic research by working closely with teachers and policy-makers. She has spearheaded high-profile research programmes assessing the impact of major reforms in the English school system on educational inequalities, and is sought out internationally as an advisor to Governments on education policy.

Becky was the inaugural Charles Yidan Global Fellow at Harvard University. Her academic expertise and extensive publications centre on social identities and inequalities in educational contexts. She is best known for her body of research on social identities and educational attainment, including gender, race and social class.

Our seventh Camden Conversation session will be led by Olly Newton, Executive Director of the Edge Foundation and will be about different models of school practice.

Olly oversees Edge’s work on research, policy and Edge Future Learning. He is passionate about connecting researchers, policy makers and practitioners to learn from each other.

Before Edge, he spent ten years with the Department for Education, most recently as Head of Apprenticeship Strategy. Olly is based in Sheffield where he is a governor and Enterprise Adviser for Firth Park Academy and volunteers with the Scout Association.

The Edge Foundation works to inspire the education system to give all young people across the UK the knowledge, skills and behaviours they need to flourish in their future life and work. It believes in a broad and balanced curriculum, interactive and engaging real-world learning, high-quality technical and professional training and rich relationships between education and employers.

Our sixth Camden Conversation session will be led by Dr Lee Elliot Major , the country’s first Professor of Social Mobility at the University of Exeter. His session will be called Apocalypse or new dawn? Social mobility and education in the post-Covid era.

Lee Elliot Major is Britain’s first Professor of Social Mobility, based at the University of Exeter, and formerly Chief Executive of the Sutton Trust.

He has written several award-winning books including Social Mobility and Its Enemies and W hat Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility? , cited by the FT as one of the books of 2020.

Lee is one of the most prominent public voices in national debates over fairness, education inequality and social mobility. He is the first in his family to attend higher education and lived on his own from age 15. He has served as a school governor in Camden for 20 years, currently at William Ellis School, and is a Camden parent.

He was formerly a trustee of the Education Endowment Foundation, and was previously a journalist for the Guardian and THES.

His current research is looking at education inequalities induced by the Covid crisis. Lee was awarded an OBE in 2019. In July 2020 he was one of 20 people named in ‘People Management's Diversity and Inclusion Power List’.

He was recently made a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is an Associate Member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford, an Associate of LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance, a Visiting Fellow at the LSE’s International Inequalities Institute. He is also an Honorary Professor at the UCL Institute of Education. He is a trustee of the Ted Wragg Trust.

Our fourth Camden Conversation session will be led by Peter Hyman, Co-Director of Big Education. Please note this session will start at the slightly earlier time of 3:45pm and finish by 4:45pm.

Peter is the co-founder and the first head teacher of School 21, a pioneering 4-18 school that opened in Stratford, East London in 2012. The school has a growing reputation for developing oracy (speaking) skills having set up Voice 21, a charity working with more than 400 schools across the country. It has also developed sophisticated programmes for real world learning and wellbeing.

Peter Hyman and the other co-founders of School 21 held a shared belief that education must be done differently if we are to prepare young people properly for the world they are going into. Their conviction was that we needed schools to rebalance head (academic success), heart (character and well-being) and hand (generating ideas, problem solving, making a difference).

School 21 has developed a series of pedagogies and approaches that give students the chance to find their voice, develop deep knowledge and understanding, and create beautiful work that has real value beyond the classroom.

For nine years to 2003, Peter worked as a strategist and speechwriter to the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. He left to become a teaching assistant in a challenging Islington school, before training as a history teacher and working his way up to become a head teacher. He is author of 1 out of 10, from Downing Street Vision to Classroom Reality.

The next Camden Conversation session will be on Wednesday 24 February, 4pm-5pm , and will be led by Lee Jerome, Associate Professor of Education at Middlesex University, on the subject of Children's Rights in Schools: Getting it right and avoiding the pitfalls.

During the session, Lee will share international research evidence about the impact of children's rights education (CRE) and highlight the benefits for children and teachers. He will offer a series of benchmarks for good practice to illustrate the implications of CRE for whole-school policy, curriculum planning, teaching and community relations. As well as highlighting these successes, he will also cover some of the common pitfalls experienced by others which teachers might fruitfully plan to avoid.

Lee Jerome is Associate Professor of Education at Middlesex University and a founder-member of the Association for Citizenship Teaching. He has been writing educational resources, training teachers, and conducting research in citizenship and children's rights education for 20 years. In this presentation, Lee will draw on research conducted for his forthcoming book with Hugh Starkey: 'Children's Rights Education in Diverse Classrooms'.

Andy Sprakes, Executive Principal of XP School in Doncaster, will be leading our second Camden Conversation session on Wednesday 10 February 2021 between 4pm - 5pm. These sessions are designed to support the development of our new education strategy, Coming Back Stronger, by opening our thinking to fresh ideas.

As part of our intention to involve schools in the development of Coming Back Stronger, Camden’s new education strategy, we are delighted to invite you to the first in a series of Camden Conversations designed to help us think more broadly and creatively. These will take place on-line, from 4pm to 5pm, fortnightly on Wednesdays. We are inviting a number of interesting speakers, practitioners and thinkers to lead these sessions.

The first is being led by Ed Vainker, CEO, Reach Foundation and co-founder of the Reach Academy Feltham and the Reach Children’s Hub. The Academy is an all-through school serving pupils from 2-18 years in Hounslow. The Children’s Hub seeks to bring about change from ‘cradle to career’ by ‘catalysing collective action and delivering transformational programmes’.