About Powerful Knowledge

Powerful Knowledge is a place for people interested in education; in how education relates both to the society in which we live and the society in which we would like to live. I will try to address the big trends and themes in education, but also to grapple with the more concrete challenges and opportunities facing students, parents, teachers, lecturers, administrators and policymakers.

This is more treacherous ground than it ought to be. People’s varying experience of education has become a source of keenly-felt social division. Opinions about education, its substance and its structures, have become fierce flags of wider ideological affinity. Neither development makes for healthy public debate. So, I will try at all times to remain constructive, to weigh the evidence and to avoid partisanship—other than that which comes from being fundamentally an advocate for the emancipatory power of education.

I will focus mostly on the British education system, the system I know best, but I will try wherever possible to compare that system to others that face the same pressures. I do not use artificial intelligence tools to write posts or articles, but I do find them useful research tools to be used alongside ‘analog’ methods like reading and talking to people. Finally, I will inevitably draw on my own experience and that of others currently serving as teachers and school leaders. For reasons I will explore, discussions about education too often seem to exclude the authentic, though often inconvenient voice of the educator. This site is a small corrective.

(A bit) About me

I am priviledged to be the Executive Head of The London Academy of Excellence, the highest ranked sixth form provider in England offering a full A Level curriculum. I have been running state schools since 2015. I am a passionate but increasingly rusty history teacher.

I am the author, most recently, with Ian Warwick, of 'Greater Expectations: Enabling Achievement for Disadvantaged Students' (London: Sage 2024). I've helped to train and mentor school leaders for both Ambition School Leadership, the New Schools Network and as a guest lecturer at the UCL Institute of Education.

Teaching my first calling but my second career. I spent 15 years working in institutional finance. I have mixed feelings about that phase of my career, but the experience inflences my perspective on education. It's best to be open about it.

Subscription

If you subscribe to Poweful Knowledge, you'll get full access to the site as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. You will also join a community of people with a shared interest in education. I have a day job, so I don't feel that I should charge for the time that I spend creating this content, but there are modest costs associated with maintaining the site. If you are able to contribute to help offset those costs, I would be grateful, but there's no pressure if you can't or choose not to.

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.