ABSTRACT
I’ve been working in education for over thirty years. I spent half of that time teaching in a range of schools in the maintained education sector. Having that grounding in classrooms as a teacher of maths, music and IT created a love for learning. I worked in some amazing schools and used early computers in my learning, including Commodore Pet, BBC micros, Acorn Risc PCs, Apple, IBM PCs and Atari ST machines as the basis for an early midi-based recording studio. I would have happily continued teaching if it were not for a set of circumstances that saw me moving to work for IBM for six years. I went to IBM to support an EMEA research programme called Reinventing Education. This programme exposed me to education systems across the world and I met and worked with some very talented individuals who were literally reshaping our world. My time at IBM also gave me an insight into the world of change management. In the early 2000s I left IBM and ran the IT department for a large group of independent schools in the UK, and I subsequently worked for one of the most successful groups of academies as it grew very quickly. In both those roles I was able to combine my knowledge of education with my understanding of technology to build scalable and flexible systems that have stood the test of time. In 2013, I moved on to be the director of a UK-based SME that provided IT services to education. We built a private cloud environment for education that provided IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services. It grew rapidly and provided a range of services to a diverse range of organisations.
