Our Board of Trustees

Our Board of Trustees comprises people that have been chosen for their extensive skills and experience in areas such as education, finance and asset management. Some Trustees are also members of a Local Advisory Board at one of our schools.

Chair of Board of Trustees

John Moffat

John is a professional engineer working in the nuclear industry for over 33 years. He has been a school governor 18 years with experience of both maintained and Multi Academy Trusts.

John was a National Leader in Governance between 2015 and 2021 and has supported governors across Cumbria. He is also DfE External Review of Governance trained and regularly undertakes reviews for schools in Cumbria.

John is a founder member and Trustee of Independent Governors “IGovs”, a charity established to support governors across England.

John is married with a grown-up son and is an obsessive football fan, with season tickets for Manchester United.

Deputy Chair of Board of Trustees

Mary Canavan

Mary is an experienced Executive Director, and award winning HR Director, with a career firmly rooted in the public and not for profit sectors, building organisational capability to deliver high performing services.

Mary is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Mary is the Chair of the Trust’s Remuneration Committee and also Chair of Moorcroft School’s Local Advisory Board.

Trustee

Albert Read

Albert is a media executive, speaker and author. He has served as Chair of The Evening Standard and Managing Director of Condé Nast Britain, overseeing titles such as Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, Tatler and Wired. Earlier he established Condé Nast’s operations in China, India and the UAE, and co-founded the Condé Nast College of Fashion and Design. He is an External Advisor to Bain & Company, and has held board roles at IPSO, the Professional Publishers Association and Ian Fleming Publications. He is the author of The Imagination Muscle (Little, Brown, 2023), a cultural history of creativity. He read Classics at Oxford and holds an MBA from INSEAD.

Trustee

Angela St.John

Angela St John sits on the Local Advisory Board at Pentland Field School. Angela is a former Assistant Director of Children’s Services in a London Borough from where she moved into the private sector providing education services to a range of authorities for Babcock International.

Now an independent consultant, she specialises in change management, school organisation and pupil place planning, and education capital strategy.

Trustee

Anne Marie Neatham

Anne Marie has been chief operations officer at Ocado Technology since 2014, looking after infrastructure and operations, organisational development and general management.

Trustee

Emily Ellington

Emily is a SEND consultant and experienced strategic leader who has worked across local government and private sectors.

She previously led the local area SEND Strategy for a large London authority as Head of SEND & Inclusion and most recently worked as the Corporate Head of Inclusion for GEMS Education. In this role she managed strategic development across 50 schools within the UAE, in response to legislative changes surrounding the ‘inclusion’ agenda.

Emily holds post-graduate qualifications in Special and Additional Learning Needs and Integrative Counselling and is currently completing a PhD in Psychology at the University of Southampton. Her research is being conducted in partnership with Southampton CCG and centres on autistic young people at risk of hospital admission.

Trustee

David Edwards

David Edwards is Professor of Paediatrics at King’s College London, and Consultant Neonatologist at Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospital NHS Trust where he works with extremely vulnerable infants and families and has established a research department developing treatments for infants with brain damage.

This work has been recognised by a a number of national and international awards.

He is also a Trustee of Action Medical Research, and the Galen and Hilary Weston Foundation.

Trustee

Jane Inglese

Jane has worked in Special Educational Needs in Harrow, as teacher, trainer and mentor, for more than 40 years. During that time she has achieved qualifications in various specialist areas including counselling and the therapeutic use of the arts in education. Jane continues to work in Park High School as a specialist teacher for young people with Autistic Spectrum Conditions and in 2020 received the Jack Petchy award for Leadership in Education. Jane has worked closely with local support groups for parents and families over many years.

Jane has been a governor, and latterly Chair, at Sunshine House School for more than 12 years and is now Chair of the Dene Road Committee.

Other voluntary activities include Chair of Churches Together in Eastcote, in which Jane has served since its inauguration in 1993.

Jane is married with two grown-up children and two grandchildren.

Trustee

Jason Rose

Jason Rose has extensive experience in risk, compliance and financial services, with a career spanning senior leadership roles across the sector. He currently serves as Head of Non-Financial Risk at Medical Protection Society, where he leads work to embed risk frameworks, strengthen risk assessment and reporting, and support operational resilience.

Trustee

Mari Ladu

Mari is a senior executive with over 20 years’ experience operating at Chief Operating Officer and Executive level across the public and private sectors, including local government, NHS and private hospital management (including major trauma centres), as well as policing. She specialises in strategic and operational leadership, transformation, governance and assurance in complex, highly regulated environments.

Alongside her executive career, Mari is an Animal Welfare Trustee with the local RSPCA and supports Cats Protection as a committee member and through frontline community programmes, including Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR). She is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, holds the safeguarding portfolio for the Trust, and sits on the Finance and Resources Committee. She is currently serving her second four-year term as a trustee.

Trustee

Victoria Collis

Victoria is Managing Director of River Path Associates, a strategic consulting firm with a focus on the international development system. Her primary expertise is in advising governments in low and middle income governments on strengthening delivery of public services, particularly in education. Now based in Italy, she spent a decade as a resident adviser to education and finance ministers and their teams, living and working in a range of countries including Pakistan, Lebanon, and Nigeria.

Victoria is Deputy Chair of the Board of Trustees and sits on the Remuneration Committee. She is the Portfolio Trustee for Standards, consulting regularly with the leadership team on all aspects of teaching and learning in Eden schools.

In her spare time she is supporting her sisters to establish a permaculture farm in rural Tuscany.

Our Board of Trustees