The Mona Lisa Effect

I have worked in and alongside schools for almost 30 years: first as a teacher, then as a school leader and Principal, and now as a consultant and coach. I have always been drawn to the spaces between what schools say and how they feel; between who we think we are and how others experience us; between the map of data and the soil of territory. That is where I do my best listening. And it is where I have found the richest stories.

I live on the Isle of Skye. It is a place that continues to shape how I think about systems and the relationships that move within them. The natural environment here invites attention – both to what surrounds me and to what connects us. It reminds me that belonging is not just a human need, but an ecological one too. These threads run through my work, wherever in the world it takes me.

I am drawn to schools that are willing to look inward – honestly, courageously, and with care. To leaders who want to understand and address the tensions that show up in culture and climate, data and day-to-day experience. To communities asking complex questions about who they are, and what belonging really feels like. I do not offer simple answers, but I help to create the space and the safety to explore the ones that matter most.

Educated at Oxford, but still learning every day. I bring both scholarship and lived experience to this work. My consultancy takes me into schools and school groups around the world, often in sustained partnership over time. I am also a practising coach and mentor, registered with the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, and, having led an award-winning international school myself, understand the tensions, traps and trials of aligning belief and practice.

I do not do this work alone. I am proud to be a CIS-affiliated consultant, which hallmark also communicates a commitment to safeguarding above all else, and to be an Affiliate Member of SENIA International, whose mission chimes so much with my own. My longstanding relationship with Data in Schools has augmented my own work on data, and I have lots of fun co-hosting their Data Talks podcast. And I am also the Founder and Facilitator of DALIS (Data and Assessment Leaders in International Schools).

Alongside my consultancy, I serve on the boards of international schools in Europe and Africa, and on the advisory boards of Parents Alliance for Inclusion and the Global Equality Collective. With ECIS and tp bennett architects, I co-created the Liberating School Spaces project, exploring how design can transform our schools into sanctuaries of equity and justice.

Finally, I love writing and speaking, and I share my thinking through conferences, publications and networks worldwide, in collaboration with the likes of CIS, ECIS, EARCOS, COBIS, BSME, SENIA International, International School Leader magazine and International Teacher Magazine, Teach Middle East, and TIE Online.

At the heart of it all is data: reimagined as the signals we choose to hear, and how we choose to listen. When schools use new and renewed ways of knowing to design their cultures and systems, belonging can move from just a promise to a promise kept. This is the work that matters most to me, and I would love to explore it with you.