Heads & Tales

Simon O'Connor is the founding headmaster of Harrow International School Dubai, which opened its doors this September. A former choral scholar at Cambridge, he spent seven years as principal of Jumeirah College and took Deira International School to an "outstanding" rating in eighteen months. In this episode, Simon takes us behind the curtain of launching a brand-new school, explains his concept o...

Dr Tom Kelly has been Head of School at Horace Mann, one of New York's most celebrated independent schools, since 2005. His path there was far from conventional: as a student he spent a semester deliberately living as a homeless person, an experience that left him determined to waste no more time on hate. In this episode, Tom reflects on the hardest shift in school leadership, why partnership has...

Dr Annalies Corbin is the founder and CEO of the PAST Foundation, an anthropologist by training who has spent more than 25 years connecting learning with real life. Her organisation brings schools, industry, research and communities together around hands-on, problem-based education, with students at the centre of the work. In this episode, Annalies argues that children are disengaged not because t...

Adam Seldon is a teacher and author who has spent almost a decade in the classroom. The son of two teachers, he joined the profession through Teach First and has worked as a head of history, head of year and assistant principal. His new book, Around the World in Eighty Schools, follows his journey to more than 80 schools across six continents in pursuit of one question: what makes a great school?...

Eugene du Toit is Master of Haileybury, leading around 900 pupils across 500 acres of Hertfordshire. Born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa, he came to teaching via business economics and PwC, and has since led through St Paul's, Trinity Croydon and Wellington School. In this episode, Eugene makes the case that a child's humanity matters more than ever in a technological world, explains why h...

Shaun Fenton OBE is headmaster of Reigate Grammar School, Surrey's leading co-educational independent day school, and a former chair of HMC. The son of rock star Alvin Stardust, Shaun began his career in accountancy before a conversation with his old teacher drew him into education. In this episode, he makes the case for educating children to be well-educated rather than just well-qualified, argue...

Ramón Javier is head of school at George Jackson Academy, a middle school for boys on Manhattan's Lower East Side where every family receives financial assistance. A lifelong New Yorker and Prep for Prep alumnus, Ramón grew up on welfare in Washington Heights before attending boarding school, Williams College and Columbia. In this episode, he explains how a school funded almost entirely through ph...

Alex Crossman, now Principal and Chief Executive of St George's British International School Rome, joined us while he was still executive head teacher of the London Academy of Excellence, the state sixth form in Newham that this year sent more students to Oxford and Cambridge than Eton or St Paul's. His own story mirrors the school's mission: he grew up on a West Midlands council estate, knew no o...

Sally-Anne Huang is High Master of St Paul's School and the first woman to lead it in its 510-year history. After two decades in girls' education, she took the top job at St Paul's in 2020 and this September opens the St Paul's School Research Centre for the Education of Boys. In this episode, Sally-Anne makes the case for single-sex education at a time when many schools are going co-ed, explains...

Lord Theodore Agnew is the founder of the Inspiration Trust and a former Minister in both the Department for Education and the Treasury. One of seven children raised in Norfolk, he failed his 11-plus and left for Australia at 18 with no qualifications, before returning to build a successful insurance business and, later, one of the country's most respected academy trusts. In this episode, Lord Agn...

Tracy Fedonchik is head of school at St Luke's School, a K-8 school on a rare two-acre campus in downtown Manhattan. She came to education as a career changer in her late twenties, quitting a job as a vice president of sales and marketing to volunteer in a third grade classroom at the Dalton School, where she stayed for more than two decades before taking up headship in 2023. In this episode, Trac...

Dr Carl Ward is one of the most influential voices in national education. He advises Number 10's policy unit, chairs the Foundation for Education Development and has run City Learning Trust in Stoke-on-Trent for close to 15 years, making him one of the longest serving trust CEOs in the country. In this episode, Carl argues that the Secretary of State should govern the education system rather than...

Jennifer Wallace is the New York Times bestselling author of Never Enough and Mattering, and a former producer at CBS's 60 Minutes. Her work began with a 2019 article covering two national policy reports that named students at high achieving schools as a group at serious risk, two to six times more likely to suffer from clinical anxiety and depression than the average American teenager. In this ep...

Dr Alex Curtis is head of school at Choate Rosemary Hall, the Connecticut boarding school whose alumni include JFK. He has led the school for 15 years, but his journey started on the other side of the Atlantic – at St Paul's Boys in London in the 1980s, where rigour and discomfort were treated as the same thing. It was only at Swarthmore that he discovered learning could be joyful. In this episode...

We recorded this conversation with Alastair Chirnside when he was warden of St Edward's School, Oxford. This month, it was announced that he will become the next Head Master of Eton College. Alastair was Henry's classics teacher at Eton, but his route into education was far from conventional – he spent five years in fund management at Schroders before deciding that finance was not for him over a 3...

Vicky Bingham is headmistress of North London Collegiate School, only the 10th head since the school's founding in 1850. A classicist by training, she's spent her entire career in girls' education after falling in love with the culture at her first teaching interview. In this episode, Vicky explains why girls' schools have a culture that enjoys change, shares her phone policy (Year 7s can't bring...

Charlie Burley was a primary school teacher until a panic attack in his year six classroom led to a diagnosis of chronic stress and anxiety. The doctor told him he needed a whole lifestyle change. Now he runs The Teacher's Health Coach, helping teachers build sustainable habits without sacrificing their health. In this episode, Charlie explains his six Cs framework for teacher wellbeing, offers a...

Jamie Beaton started Crimson Education at 17 after getting into 25 of the world's top universities. He went to Harvard two years ahead of schedule, is now on his 12th degree and has built Crimson into a billion-dollar company operating in 20 countries. In this episode, Jamie explains what his mum did differently when he was growing up, shares his view that countries moving away from standardised e...

James Hooke has been headmaster of Harrodian School for over 25 years. He joined in 1995, just two years after it was founded, responding to a tiny ad in the TES and turning up to the interview with his six-month-old daughter in a car seat. The school then had 60 pupils; today it serves over a thousand. In this episode, James reflects on how to retain a family feel as a school grows, explains the...

Bill Kuhn is head of school at Birch Wathen Lenox, a K-12 school on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He came to education late after a career in finance, and fell in love with explaining things to kids while tutoring on the side. In this episode, Bill explains why BWL puts "constructive dialogue" at the heart of everything, from kindergarten debates about ice cream flavours through to upper school stu...

Susannah Hardyman MBE is CEO of Impetus, the organisation that finds the best education and youth employment charities and helps them scale. She founded Action Tutoring from her kitchen in 2011, grew it to 7,000 pupils a year, then found herself advising government on the National Tutoring Programme when COVID hit. In this episode, Susannah reflects on what that whirlwind taught her about implemen...

Melody Lang isn't a head teacher. She's an investor, a mathematician and an engineer who's spent 15 years figuring out what actually works in EdTech and what's just noise. In this episode, she shares the red flags she looks for in products, explains why she thinks traditional exams are testing the wrong things, and doesn't hold back on higher education: the middle tier is in trouble, and maybe you...

Guðmundur Hegner Jónsson is the founding principal of Lisbon International School, a new values-driven school housed in a converted 1905 pasta factory. His path to education is unlike any other: he dug up Viking burials for Iceland's National Museum, trained as a bass vocalist at the Royal Academy of Music, and spent 20 years teaching across Serbia, China, the UAE and South Korea before becoming r...

Toby Seth is Whitgift's 30th headmaster, back in his South London roots having been educated at Dulwich College. A linguist by training with a degree from Trinity Cambridge, he's held leadership roles at Wellington College, Godolphin and Latymer and Pocklington before returning south. Now midway through his first year at Whitgift, Toby shares his passionate case for languages as a way of becoming...

Jesse Elzinga has been head of Sevenoaks since 2020, leading one of the UK's flagship IB schools. A dual US-UK citizen raised on a farm outside Detroit, Jesse sold apples at farmers markets before winning a place at Harvard with a generous bursary, then a scholarship to Oxford. That journey drives his ambition to have one in three Sevenoaks students on a free or assisted place by the school's 600t...