Ed Balls was appointed Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families on 28 June 2007. His principal focus is to ensure that every child gets the best possible start in life, that they are safe and healthy, that they secure the highest standards of achievements, that they enjoy their childhood and that they can make a positive contribution to society free from the effects of poverty.
Ed Balls was previously Economic Secretary to the Treasury, taking up appointment on 5 May 2006. He has been a Member of Parliament for Normanton since 2005. He was born in 1967 and educated at Nottingham High School, Keble College, Oxford and the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard.
Ed Balls was a teaching fellow for the Department of Economics at Harvard 1989-1990, and an economics leader writer and columnist for the Financial Times 1990-94. He was Economic Adviser to the then Shadow Chancellor Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP 1994-97, Secretary Labour Party Economic Policy Commission 1994-97, Economic Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer 1997-99, Chief Economic Adviser to HM Treasury 1999-2004, and Research Fellow, Smith Institute 2004-05.
Ed Balls has had a number of publications including Towards a new regional policy, Reforming Britain’s economic and financial policy: towards greater economic stability and Microeconomic reform in Britain: delivering opportunities for all. He is a member of the TGWU, Unison and the Co-operative Party.
Watch Ed Balls´ speech to the conference.
Michael Barber joined McKinsey in September 2005 as the expert partner in its Global Public Sector Practice. He has been working on major challenges of performance, organisation and reform in government and the public services in the USA, UK and other countries.
Prior to joining McKinsey, Michael was chief adviser on delivery to the prime minister, responsible for overseeing the implementation of priority programmes in health, education, transport, policing, the criminal justice system and asylum/immigration.
Between 1997 and 2001, Michael was chief adviser to the secretary of state for education on school standards. He was responsible for the implementation of the government’s school reform programme, including successful programmes to improve literacy and numeracy at primary level, tackle school failure at all levels and contract out failing local authorities.
View the slides from Michael Barber’s presentation 
(208kb, 11 pages)
IIshmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone on 23 November 1980. When he was 11, Ishmael’s life, along with the lives of millions of other Sierra Leoneans, was derailed by the outbreak of a brutal civil war. After his parents and two brothers were killed, Ishmael was recruited to fight as a child soldier. He was 13. He fought for over two years before he was removed from the army by UNICEF and placed in a rehabilitation home in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. After completing rehabilitation in late 1996, Ishmael won a competition to attend a conference at the United Nations to talk about the devastating effects of war on children in his country. It was there that he met his new mother, Laura Simms, a professional storyteller who lives in New York. Ishmael returned to Sierra Leone and continued speaking about his experiences to help bring international attention to the issue of child soldiering and war affected children.
In 1998 Ishmael came to live with his American family in New York City. He completed high school at the United Nations International School, and subsequently went on to Oberlin College in Ohio. Throughout his high school and undergraduate education, Ishmael continued his advocacy work to bring attention to the plight of child soldiers and children affected by war around the world, speaking on numerous occasions on behalf of UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, United Nations Secretary General’s Office for Children and Armed Conflict, at the United Nations General Assembly, serving on a UN panel with Secretary General Kofi Annan and discussing the issue with dignitaries such as Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton. He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Division Committee. Ishmael’s book, A Long Way Gone, reached number one in The New York Times best seller list in April 2007.
Ishmael’s book, A Long Way Gone, is available to buy.
David Booth is professor emeritus and co-ordinator of the Pre-Service Elementary program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
David is working with principals and school leaders in building literacy communities that support every student’s needs as a developing reader and writer in today’s society. He is supporting teachers at all levels in their attempts to connect the outside literacies of home and community with the inside literacies of school and education. David sees the importance of recognising the strategies and competencies students bring with them to school from life experiences and from the technological world, and exploring and extending the wide range of communication literacies, including printed texts and images in a variety of formats, to improve and enrich the literacy lives of students.
Stephen M R Covey is co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of CoveyLink Worldwide. A sought-after and compelling keynote speaker and adviser on trust, leadership, ethics and high performance, he speaks to audiences around the world. He is the author of The SPEED of Trust, a groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting book that challenges our age-old assumption that trust is merely a soft, social virtue and instead demonstrates that trust is a hard-edged, economic driver – a learnable and measurable skill that makes organisations more profitable, people more promotable, and relationships more energising. Audiences and organisations alike resonate with his informed, practical approach to real-time issues that affect their immediate and long-term performance.
He is the former CEO of Covey Leadership Center, which, under his stewardship, became the largest leadership development company in the world. Stephen personally led the strategy that propelled his father’s book, Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, to become one of the two most influential business books of the 20th Century, according to CEO Magazine.
A Harvard MBA, he joined Covey Leadership Center as a client developer and later became national sales manager and then president and CEO. Under Covey’s direction, both customer and employee trust reached new highs and the company expanded throughout the world into over 40 countries.
Covey currently serves on the board/advisory board of several entities, including the Human Performance Institute – the leader in energy management technology – where he serves as advisory board chairman.
Reviews of two of Stephen M R Covey’s books are available in the Leadership Library.
Christine Gilbert CBE was appointed as her majesty’s chief inspector at Ofsted in October 2006. She has spent 18 years in teaching, eight of these as headteacher of Whitmore High School in Harrow, before taking up the post of director of education in the same borough. She joined the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in April 1997 as corporate director (education). Before moving to Ofsted, she held the post of chief executive of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets for six years.
View the slides from Christine Gilbert’s presentation (436kb, 15 pages)
Monty Halls is an adventurer in the finest traditions of British exploration. A former Royal Marines officer and trained marine biologist, Monty has led teams through some of the most demanding environments on land and at sea. His adventures include discovering pre-historic settlements amid great white sharks, avoiding the bullets of poachers, and photographing a dangerous and rare crocodile underwater for the first time. An entertaining and dynamic force on the podium, Monty is able to address topics such as effective leadership, staying motivated, teams under stress, and how to maintain the aim in a changing environment. Monty’s presentations range from hilarious after-dinner speeches, sporting talks about his life as a dive journalist, providing entertaining professional links as a host or MC, right through to detailed motivational seminars, all of which are supported by excellent photographs and film footage. Monty excels at entertaining his audience. He has an engaging personality and it is no surprise that the man who has been called ‘the new Cousteau’ and ‘a cross between Indiana Jones and a male model’ is increasingly in demand for TV presenting work.
What is unusual about many of Monty’s expeditions is that he often has to turn inexperienced individuals into effective teams that will cope with projects in extraordinary environments. Taking disparate groups, identifying a clear aim, and then creating the momentum and techniques to overcome any obstacle to achieve results – this is a challenge Monty Halls has undertaken with characteristic gusto during a decade of projects. People tend to react to the team environment in certain ways, regardless of the setting or circumstances. Monty believes that understanding these group dynamics are key to effective leadership, and his presentations reveal just why we behave the way we do when stress is applied, and how to manage such behaviour. His teams operate in some of the most rapidly changing environments on earth, and yet must learn to flex, evolve and adapt to their surroundings.
Monty’s presentations investigate:
His style is exceptionally dynamic, light-hearted, frequently hilarious, and open to investigation and questioning from the floor.
Professor Andy Hargreaves is the Thomas More Brennan chair in education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Its mission is to promote social justice and connect theory and practice in education. Andy has written numerous books on culture, change and leadership in education that are available in many languages. His most recent book, written with Dean Fink, is Sustainable Leadership.
View the slides from Andy Hargreaves’ presentation (460kb, 25 pages)
Kati Haycock is one of the nation’s leading child advocates in the field of education. She currently serves as president of the Education Trust. Established in 1992, the trust does what no other Washington-based education organisation seeks to do – speaks up for what’s right for young people, especially those who are poor or members of minority groups. The trust also provides hands-on assistance to educators who want to work together to improve student achievement, pre-kindergarten through college.
Prior to coming to the Education Trust, Haycock served as executive vice president of the Children’s Defense Fund, the nation’s largest child advocacy organisation. A native Californian, Haycock founded and served as president of The Achievement Council, a statewide organisation that provides assistance to teachers and principals in predominately minority schools in improving student achievement. Before that, she served as director of the Outreach and Student Affirmative Action programs for the nine-campus University of California system.
View the slides from Kati Haycock’s presentation (1.75Mb, 163 pages – warning: large file)
David Hopkins is the inaugural HSBC Chair of International Leadership at the Institute of Education, University of London where he supports the work of iNet, the international arm of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust and the Institute’s London Centre for Leadership in Learning.
Between 2002 and 2005 he served three Secretary of States as the Chief Adviser on School Standards at the then Department for Education and Skills and as Director of the Standards and Effectiveness Unit where he succeeded Sir Michael Barber. Prior to that, between 1996 and 2001, David was variously Professor of Education, Chair of the School of Education and Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Nottingham where he is now Professor Emeritus. In December 1999 he was appointed by the Secretary of State to Chair the Leicester City Partnership Board and as such was responsible for the ‘modernisation’ of the Local Education Authority. David previously worked as an instructor and programme director with Outward Bound, a schoolteacher and university lecturer, and for 11 years was a tutor at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Education.
David is committed to improving the quality of education for all, and the orientation of his work is characterised by an integration of policy, research, and practice. He is a long-time consultant to the OECD on issues of policy innovation, school improvement and teacher quality, as well as to the World Health Organisation, the SOROS Foundation, the Aga Khan Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank on the themes of education reform and school development.
David has published over 30 books on educational issues. Among them are: Models of Learning – Tools for Teaching (Second Edition, Open University Press, 2002, with Bruce Joyce and Emily Calhoun); Improving the Quality of Education for All (Second Edition, Fulton, 2002); Every School a Great School (Open University Press / McGraw Hill, 2007); and A Teacher’s Guide to Classroom Research (Fourth Edition, Open University Press, 2008).
View the slides from David Hopkins’ presentation (5Mb, 61 pages – warning: large file)
Jonathan Jansen is Honorary Professor of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand and Scholar-in-Residence at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Johannesburg, South Africa. His most recent books are Knowledge in the Blood: How White Students Remember and Enact the Past (2009) and Diversity High: Class, Color, Character and Culture in a South African High School (2008); in these and other works, he examines the ways in which leadership for social justice works against the grain of biography in contexts where reparation and reconciliation both remain as important goals of social transition. He is a recent Fulbright Scholar to Stanford University (2007-2008), former Dean of Education at the University of Pretoria (2001-2007), and Honorary Doctor of Education from the University of Edinburgh. He is a former high school science teacher and achieved his undergraduate education in South Africa (UWC) and his postgraduate education in the USA (MS, Cornell; PhD Stanford).
Baroness Sally Morgan of Huyton currently works as adviser to the board of the charity ARK, and is also chair of Future Leaders. She is a non-executive director of both Carphone Warehouse and Southern Cross Healthcare and is a member of Lloyds Pharmacy Advisory Panel. Sally also sits on the board of the Olympic Delivery Authority.
As a member of the House of Lords since 2001, her particular interests are public services and, as a former minister for women, equality issues. Sally worked for Tony Blair from 1995 and then in No 10 Downing Street as director of government relations until May 2005. Sally started her career as a secondary school teacher.
As NCSL’s chief executive, Steve’s role is to set the College’s strategic direction. He was formerly director of Education and Lifelong Learning at Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council, where his work was widely commended. Steve began his career as a secondary school teacher in Birmingham, later moving to the north east of England, where he worked as a teacher and then as a lecturer. In 1987, he became a consultant on assessment and records of achievement working for the nine north east local authorities, before taking up a post at Oldham Borough Council in 1989 as an inspector within the education department. In Oldham, he went on to manage the Advisory Service before moving to Blackburn with Darwen as assistant director in 1997. From 2000 to March 2005, he was director of Education and Lifelong Learning in Knowsley.
View the slides from Steve Munby´s presentation (596kb, 23 pages)
Richard Olivier is artistic director of Olivier Mythodrama – a unique leadership development consultancy.
He was a leading theatre director for over 10 years and directed Henry V for the opening of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London in 1997. He has worked extensively in the fields of organisational and personal development. His work today is at the leading edge of bringing the world of theatre into the development of authentic leaders.
Richard is the founding voice within Mythodrama – a new form of experiential learning which combines great stories with psychological insights, creative exercises and organisational development techniques to explore issues faced by modern leaders. From 1999–2005 he was the master of Mythodrama at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
He is the co-author (with Nicholas Janni) of Peak Performance Presentations – How to Present with Passion and Purpose, and the author of Inspirational Leadership – Henry V and the Muse of Fire.
Richard is an associate fellow of Templeton College, Oxford, Oxford Said Business School and a fellow of the Findhorn Foundation. He works internationally as a leadership development consultant and conference speaker. He was a guest speaker at the 2003 World Economic Forum in Davos.
Gerry began his career in 1965 in the cost office of Lesney Products (Matchbox Toys) after leaving St Mary’s Seminary at Castlehead. During his time at Lesney he progressed through various accounting roles to become chief management accountant in 1974.
In 1974 he moved to Lex Service Group as the management accountant for Lex’s Volvo network. By 1980 he had become financial controller and finance director of Lex Industrial Distribution and Hire. He left Lex in 1980 to become finance director of Grand Metropolitan’s UK Coca Cola business. A year later he became its sales and marketing director and then its managing director. In 1983 he was appointed managing director of Grand Metropolitan’s troubled International Services business and went on to become chief executive of the whole Contract Services division which in that year had lost some £10.5m.
In 1987 he led the UK’s then largest management buy-out with the £163m purchase of the Division, subsequently renamed the Compass Group. The Compass Group was later floated on the London market.
He joined Granada in October 1991 as chief executive and was chairman from 1996 until 2001. He has also been chairman of BSkyB Plc, ITN, Arts Council England and Allied Domecq Plc. He is currently chairman of Moto Hospitality Ltd.
Gerry has led a business series for the BBC – I’ll Show Them Who’s Boss – and written a book of the same title on business leadership. He has more recently presented a three-part programme for BBC2 titled Can Gerry Robinson Fix the NHS? and is currently completing a follow up. He has appeared on numerous chat shows and current affairs programmes on both TV and radio in the UK and Ireland.
Gerry was awarded a knighthood in the 2003 New Year Honours for services to the arts and business.
Access the Leadership Library to see short video stories from Gerry Robinson about leadership and management development.
As Chairman of NCSL’s Governing Council, Vanni Treves is instrumental in advising and guiding the College. For 30 years he was a Partner (for 12 of them Senior Partner) at Macfarlanes, a major City law firm, specialising in corporate law and international transactions. He is now Chairman of Korn/Ferry International, The Equitable Life Assurance Society and Intertek Group Plc, and has in the past been Chairman of three other public companies and, until recently, of Channel 4 Television Corporation and of London Business School, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. He is a member of the Council for Industry and Higher Education, a Governor of Sadler’s Wells, a Trustee of the J Paul Getty Charitable Trust and Solicitor to The Royal Academy. He holds an MA in Jurisprudence and an LLM in International Law and writes and lectures regularly on boardroom topics, especially corporate governance.
View the slides from Vanni Treves´s presentation (628kb, 19 pages)
Mick Waters’ role at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) is to ‘develop a modern, world-class curriculum that will inspire and challenge all learners and prepare them for the future’. To do this he works with a range of partners to build a curriculum that offers all young people the chance to enjoy success at school and in later adult life. This involves exploring what really matters in learning and supporting new developments, linked to the five outcomes for children.
Previously, Mick was chief education officer for the City of Manchester. In this challenging education environment, schools worked hard to break the cycle of urban deprivation, promoting a wide and rich curriculum and encouraging all learners to achieve as much as possible. Key agendas included the development of joint children’s services, the 14–19 strategy, the employment and skills dimension and configuring all this around Building Schools for the Future.
View the slides from Mick Waters’ presentation (2Mb, 47 pages – warning: large file)