Heads & Tales

Jamie Beaton

Jamie Beaton started Crimson Education at 17 after getting into 25 of the world's top universities. He went to Harvard two years ahead of schedule, is now on his 12th degree and has built Crimson into a billion-dollar company operating in 20 countries. In this episode, Jamie explains what his mum did differently when he was growing up, shares his view that countries moving away from standardised exams generally pay a price and reflects on the mentor who transformed his life: the late Julian Robertson, who had more confidence in him than he had in himself.

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.