Oak co-founder and ex-headteacher leaves position advising training secretary Gillian Keegan to run fledgling maths charity
Oak co-founder and ex-headteacher leaves position advising training secretary Gillian Keegan to run fledgling maths charity
A senior coverage adviser to the training secretary has left the Division for Schooling to run a fledgling maths charity.
Thomas, a former headteacher who co-founded the Oak Nationwide Academy on-line studying platform through the Covid pandemic, was a senior coverage adviser to 5 training secretaries since his appointment in October 2021.
He crammed a emptiness left by long-serving civil servant Chris Paterson, who left the division after seven years to affix the Schooling Endowment Basis.
Thomas initially labored on the DfE part-time on restoration, academies and distant training coverage whereas holding his position as a regional director on the Astrea Academies Belief, however went full-time final August.
Nonetheless, he departed final week to turn into the chief government of Arithmetic Schooling for Social Mobility and Excellence (MESME).
A DfE spokesperson stated: “We’re grateful for the experience David has dropped at the division since he joined in late 2021 and want him all the very best in his future endeavours.
“Recruitment is underway and we are going to announce the profitable candidate in the end.”
Charity runs enrichment programme for pupils
MESME is a recently-registered charity which runs a “new and thrilling nationwide enrichment programme for high-attaining secondary college college students: MESME Maths Circles”.
The charity goals to assist double the variety of PhD college students within the mathematical sciences at a UK college by 2035.
Its web site states that it’s “dedicated that this improve should embrace a consultant proportion, on the minimal, of scholars from deprived socio-economic backgrounds who went to highschool within the UK”.
Thomas was beforehand a method director at Inspiration Belief and a principal at its Jane Austen Faculty for 3 years.
He taught for 4 years at Westminster Academy as much as August 2015, and whereas there he had a short spell as a stragegy adviser on the DfE.
Whereas on the division he helped design the brand new evaluation system to interchange nationwide curriculum ranges, his LinkedIn profile states.
Thomas additionally labored for two-and-a-half years as an engagement supervisor at administration consultants Mckinsey and Firm from 2015.
The previous maths trainer accomplished his PGCE with Educate First on the Institute of Schooling.
Thomas’s appointment to a maths charity comes as prime minister Rishi Sunak is working up plans to make all pupils research some type of maths till they’re 18.
