RETHINKING EDUCATION, EDUCATION CRITICAL FRIEND
WE ♥ EDUCATION
We draw little love hearts around it in the back of our exercise books.
​
But there's always room for improvement, isn't there?
​
We improve outcomes for children and young people through...
1. TEACHER TRAINING
We run five annual programmes for teachers, school leaders and support staff. All our programmes are bespoke, combining the use of online, remote and face-to-face delivery.
​
Click the boxes below for more details.
3. THE RETHINKING EDUCATION PODCAST
The Rethinking Education podcast has had over 250K plays to date, and is in the top 3% of podcasts globally!
Here are some of the kind things listeners have said about the podcast:
4. CARRYING OUT AND PUBLISHING RESEARCH
All our work is research-informed.
That means engaging with research – and engaging in research.
See here to explore some of the research that underpins our work.
We also carry out impact evaluations on behalf of a wide range of organisations, to help them get *even better* at what they do.
To find out how we can help you evaluate the impact of what you do – drop us a line!
Dr James Mannion, FCCT
Dr James Mannion is the Director of Rethinking Education, an organisation dedicated to improving outcomes for young people through implementation science, self-regulated learning and practitioner inquiry. He has a Masters degree in Person-Centred Education from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in Learning to Learn from the University of Cambridge. James’s doctoral thesis was an 8-year evaluation of the Learning Skills curriculum, a whole-school approach to teaching and learning that led to significant gains in subject learning across the curriculum, with accelerated gains among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This culminated in the book Fear is the Mind Killer (2020), which James co-authored with Kate McAllister. Until recently, James was a Bespoke Programmes Leader in the Centre for Educational Leadership at the UCL Institute of Education. In this role, he worked with teachers and schools throughout the UK and around the world to promote research-informed approaches to professional development and school improvement. Previously, James worked as a secondary school Science teacher for 12 years, and spent 8 years in school leadership roles. He is an Associate of Oracy Cambridge, a Founding Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching and a Bye-Fellow of Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. He is also the host of the Rethinking Education Podcast and the Rethinking Education Mighty Network, a grass-roots organisation dedicated to creating an education system that works for all young people.
Kate McAllister, FRSA, FCCT
Kate worked as a French teacher for 14 years, and has over 10 years’ experience in school leadership roles. Kate first started work on a Year 7 Learning to Learn curriculum in 2005, with the aim of helping pupils develop the knowledge and skills needed to navigate the often-difficult transition from primary to secondary school. She spent the next 10 years refining and improving both the methodology and the results, culminating in a whole-school approach to teaching and learning known as the Learning Skills curriculum. In 2015, Kate took Learning Skills to new frontiers when she set up the School Bus Project, a charity providing mobile education for refugees. Kate crowd-funded the purchase of a double decker bus, installed solar panels on the roof and spent 6 months working in refugee camps in Calais, providing much-needed education and support for people living in displacement. Following the closure of the Calais camps, Kate set up the Human Hive, a global community of organisations and individuals working together to create a more welcoming and inclusive world. Currently, Kate lives in the Dominican Republic, where she recently set up a democratic unschool, The Hive. She is an Associate of the Centre for Educational Leadership at the UCL Institute of Education, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.