My Career

I am proud to call myself a teacher.

After a successful career as a teacher, headteacher and Chief Adviser in a local authority in the UK, I returned to a headship to see if my transformational ideas would actually work in practice. I became a Headteacher in Oxfordshire, where I worked with a wonderful school community to devise and implement a transformational approach to learning that would enhance the school’s culture; giving children an ethical vocabulary, based on values such as respect, tolerance, humility and justice. The school community found that the children were empowered to be self-leaders, with an active moral compass that affected behaviour, their critical thinking and the quality of their schoolwork. It also had a profound affect on the adults as they modelled the school’s values. Today this educational philosophy is known as Values-based Education (VbE), which is recognised internationally as the foundation of outstanding school practice. 

I founded Values-based Education (VbE), a powerful and influential worldwide movement for educational and social change – see www.valuesbasededucation.com

Just before Covid lockdown I visited Australia and New Zealand.

My book, From My Heart, transforming lives through values, celebrates the success of VbE worldwide and is a great “how to” book for you to implement my model of VbE. My latest book co-authored with Jane Hawkes, is called The Inner Curriculum, how to nurture wellbeing, resilience and self-leadership. This book is heralding a new era in education, as it proposes a new more liberating way of educating children’s inner worlds.