James Hooke

James Hooke

James Hooke has been headmaster of Harrodian School for over 25 years. He joined in 1995, just two years after it was founded, responding to a tiny ad in the TES and turning up to the interview with his six-month-old daughter in a car seat. The school then had 60 pupils; today it serves over a thousand. In this episode, James reflects on how to retain a family feel as a school grows, explains the mentoring programme he's built over 19 years and shares what he looks for in Harrodian students: children who are happy to arrive and sad to leave.

Bill Kuhn

Bill Kuhn is head of school at Birch Wathen Lenox, a K-12 school on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He came to education late after a career in finance, and fell in love with explaining things to kids while tutoring on the side. In this episode, Bill explains why BWL puts "constructive dialogue" at the heart of everything, from kindergarten debates about ice cream flavours through to upper school students tackling complex opposing viewpoints. He shares his view that technology has "terrible default settings" and argues that schools should tackle controversial topics head on. His controversial opinion: protecting students from discomfort actually makes them weaker, not safer.

Susannah Hardyman MBE

Susannah Hardyman MBE is CEO of Impetus, the organisation that finds the best education and youth employment charities and helps them scale. She founded Action Tutoring from her kitchen in 2011, grew it to 7,000 pupils a year, then found herself advising government on the National Tutoring Programme when COVID hit. In this episode, Susannah reflects on what that whirlwind taught her about implementation, shares her controversial opinion that we've never properly acknowledged how badly we let down young people during the pandemic, and explains why kindness is an underrated leadership value.

Dr Melody Lang

Melody Lang isn't a head teacher. She's an investor, a mathematician and an engineer who's spent 15 years figuring out what actually works in EdTech and what's just noise. In this episode, she shares the red flags she looks for in products, explains why she thinks traditional exams are testing the wrong things, and doesn't hold back on higher education: the middle tier is in trouble, and maybe you shouldn't bother going to uni at all. She also delivers a warning every parent needs to hear: AI will make some young people smarter and others dumber, and the difference is in how they choose to use it.

Guðmundur Hegner Jónsson

Guðmundur Hegner Jónsson is the founding principal of Lisbon International School, a new values-driven school housed in a converted 1905 pasta factory. His path to education is unlike any other: he dug up Viking burials for Iceland's National Museum, trained as a bass vocalist at the Royal Academy of Music, and spent 20 years teaching across Serbia, China, the UAE and South Korea before becoming rector of UWC Red Cross Nordic. In this episode, Guðmundur explains the BOA principles at the heart of his new school, shares what it really means to give students voice rather than treating it as a tick-box exercise, and reflects on why education has become too exams-focused.