News on Camden Education Strategy

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.

Peter recently wrote an article for the Observer newspaper, which was published on Sunday 7 March 2021, called " Enough of the ‘lost generation’. Instead, let’s reimagine school for our children"