15/08/2026
Why these speakers?
For our Centenary Conference, “Active for a Century,” we chose our speakers deliberately. None of them are education theorists. All of them have spent their careers building, implementing and measuring real change — in government, in business, on stage, in classrooms.
We belive we need to hear from someone who has actually done it, what worked, what didn’t, and why.
Here’s who’s joining us on September 5th.
Ten years as England’s Schools Minister taught Nick what it actually takes to move a national system: not a new idea, but the discipline to implement one — the Phonics Screening Check, a rebuilt teacher training framework, revised curricula. The results were measurable: England’s best-ever PIRLS reading score, and a climb from 27th to 11th in the world for Maths. For school leaders wrestling with how to turn a good policy into a lived classroom practice, few people alive have done it at this scale.
Diana has spent her career deciding, from company boardrooms, what skills actually get someone hired and promoted. That’s a perspective schools rarely hear directly: not what should be taught, but what the economy is actually asking for. For anyone shaping a curriculum or a careers conversation with a student, that’s a rare and useful mirror.
Ben spent years on stage — including as a founding member of Shakespeare’s Globe — learning how to hold a room and make people listen. He now brings that, directly, to school leaders: how you communicate with staff, and especially with students, so that leadership actually lands. Every head of department gives a briefing that nobody quite hears. Ben’s worked out why, and what to do about it.
Ludovico has run education policy from every seat: municipal Secretary of Education, national director of technical education, and now coordinator of STEM Racing Argentina, where students learn engineering by building and racing their own cars. He knows, from the inside, the gap between what a ministry decides and what actually happens in a classroom — and how to close it.
Her project portfolio includes: AI-focused action research programmes across schools and multi-school organisations; edtech impact studies for
