 Valerie Hannon
Valerie Hannon is a Managing Partner of the Innovation Unit, a not-for-profit agency based in London which works in partnership with organisations from the public, private and third sectors to create better outcomes from public services at lower cost. A former county Director of Education, teacher, and university researcher, Valerie has worked in a wide range of Local Authorities and has been an adviser to the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Local Government Association, and Creative Partnerships. Her interests include the contribution of other sectors (particularly the creative, cultural and third sectors) to the transformation of public services in the 21st century through social innovation; the role of leadership; and building creative capacity amongst practitioners.
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 Professor Sugata Mitra
Professor Sugata Mitra is currently Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University in England. He is also Chief Scientist, Emeritus, at the National Institute of Information Technologies in New Delhi. He is the instigator of the Hole in the Wall 1999 experiment where a computer was placed in a kiosk created within a wall in an Indian slum in Kalkaji, Delhi. Children were allowed to freely use it. The experiment aimed at proving that children could be taught computers very easily without any formal training. Sugata termed this as Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). The experiment has since been repeated at many places. The Hole in the Wall experiment has left a mark on popular culture. Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup read about Mitra’s experiment and was inspired to write his debut novel Q and A - this subsequently went on to become the movie Slumdog Millionaire.
Professor Mitra is a leading proponent of MIE. He has a PHD in Physics and is credited with more than 25 inventions in the area of cognitive science and education technology. He was conferred the prestigious 2005 Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in Information Technology and was recently described as a “polymath” by the University of London.
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 Professor Allan Walker
Allan is Chair Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Administration and Policy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is also Associate Director of the Hong Kong Centre for the Development of Educational Leadership. Allan has experience as a teacher, school principal, university teacher and administrator, and consultant in a range of local and international settings. He has worked in universities in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong and conducted leader development courses and/or research in countries such as China, Taiwan, Norway, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Canada, the US and UK.
At present, Allan is working with teams of principals and international educators to develop, write, co-ordinate and run a series of innovative programmes designed purposefully to ground leader learning networks.He works with leaders across a wide spectrum, including aspiring, beginning and very experienced principals as well as middle leaders and principals in international schools. All his leadership learning work is done in teams with practicing leaders and aims to build sustainable learning networks.
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 Simon Breakspear
At 26, Simon represents the ‘New School’ of educational leadership and reform. He works to develop innovative, creative and entrepreneurial solutions to solve the most pressing educational challenges of our time.
After successfully completing a year of Medicine at UNSW, Simon left to pursue a career engaging and investing in young people through education. He went on to complete a first class honours degree in Psychology at UNSW, whilst speaking to over 20,000 students across Australia on the areas of leadership, independent learning and success in the global labour market. Simon taught at a leading independent school in Sydney, and at 24 held the position of Year 12 Coordinator.
In 2008 he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to complete a MSc. in Comparative and International Education at the University of Oxford and most recently has taken up a prestigious Gates Scholarship to conduct a PhD in Educational Leadership at the University of Cambridge.
From his academic and professional platforms Simon writes and speaks on the topic of re-branding education as a career of choice for the best and brightest in our nation. He has worked extensively to help educational leaders understand the need to create innovative, collaborative, inspiring and challenging school cultures in order to attract and retain talented teachers and train future leaders. He challenges educational policy-makers to put teacher and leader quality at the heart of the 21st century education reform agenda.
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 Dr Carolyn Shields
Dr Carolyn Shields, PhD University of Saskatchewan, is currently a Professor of Leadership in the Department of Educational Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She is past president of the Canadian Association for Studies in Educational Administration and former Canadian representative to the Board of the Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration and Management. Her teaching is in the area of transformative leadership, deep democracy, equitable policy, social justice, and research methodology. She conducts research related to how educational leaders can create learning environments that are deeply democratic, socially just, and inclusive of all students’ lived experiences.
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 Professor Andy Hargreaves
Why do some schools perform outstandingly well when others of the same size and serving the same kind of community do not? How do some schools sustain their record of exceeding expectations when others can only maintain it for short periods of time or under particular leaders? Can schools reverse a worrying record of decline with existing staff and leadership, or do they always need new brooms to sweep them clean? And how do you get performance that exceeds expectations not just in one or two exceptional schools but in entire groups of them within one community or local authority?
This presentation from Professor Andy Hargreaves will outline the findings from a unique project that has explored how organizations can perform remarkably beyond expectations not only in education but also in business and sport.
It will look at the ways in which the highest performing schools, districts/LAs and school systems achieve and sustain excellence in ways that parallel the very best sporting teams and business organizations that perform above expectations, especially with challenging communities or after years of poor performance and decline.
Andy Hargreaves is the Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Andy Hargreaves’ teaching and research at Boston College concentrates on educational change, performing beyond expectations, sustainable leadership and the emotions of teaching. Andy’s current research is funded by the UK Specialist and Academies Trust and the National College for School Leadership and is concerned with organizations that perform beyond expectations in education, sport, business and health.
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 Professor Louise Stoll
Louise's research and development activity focuses on how groups, organisations and systems collaborate to create capacity for learning and the creative leadership supporting this. She also explores ways to make stronger links between research, practice and policy, developing resource materials for English government agencies, a toolkit for the OECD's Improving School Leadership activity, and a research-based simulation, Networking for Learning, being introduced into several countries. Author of many publications, translated into several languages, Louise presents and consults in many countries and was ACEL's Travelling Scholar in 2004. She also presented a series of Hot Research on Teachers' TV in England.
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 Professor Brian Caldwell
Brian Caldwell is Managing Director of Educational Transformations and Associate Director of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust in England, providing support for its international arm iNet. In addition to more than 100 published papers, chapters and monographs, Brian Caldwell is author or co-author of books that helped guide educational reform in several countries, He is deputy chair of the board of the Australian Council for Educational Research and co-director of the Futures Focused School Project, a nation-wide initiative of Educational Transformations in partnership with Teaching Australia (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership) to build capacity for futures thinking and strategic planning in Australia’s schools. |
