publishing partnership with the national education trust

Go to the National Education Trust's articles page

Triarchy Press is pleased to announce its third publishing partnership. The UK’s National Education Trust is a brand new non-profit making organization and our partnership with NET is especially exciting because of the part we can play in supporting this organization - which is set to become a key player in education.

Over the next two years, Triarchy Press will publish NET pamphlets and books, beginning with a series of pamphlets entitled ‘Counterblasts’ – short texts to challenge existing educational practices. At the same time, ‘Counterblasts’ offer new ideas on how to change education for the better. These pamphlets are designed to encourage debate and new thinking in education. Triarchy will also publish NET’s ideas-in-progress on this website.

What the National Education Trust stands for:

To make education successful, ideas from key advisors and regulators, teachers and students, governors and parents must be drawn together before designing more effective ways to get things done.

As an independent trust that will influence and shape regional and national education policy through its debates and its advocacy, NET will play a vital role in drawing those ideas together. It also aims to:

promote change in education systems and practice
champion effective and imaginative practice in education
build educational skills
inculcate excellence in leadership in education
develop innovative activities and services to improve educational provision.

Critically, because it is independent, NET provides a safe space in which to test out ideas with openness and trust.

NET asks some key questions:

The kind of questions that NET is already asking include:

What do we want from our education providers?
What is 21st-century education all about?
How can it be improved?
Can we close the achievement gap?
Why are we obsessed with targets and testing?
Is a university education worth getting into debt for?

These questions, and more, will be explored through NET’s debates and through its shared conversations with people involved in education at every level.

The answers that it finds and develops will be the subject of the books and pamphlets published by Triarchy Press for NET.

Why NET and Triarchy Press are good partners:

NET’s desire to challenge orthodoxies and to search out innovative ways to improve systems and practice in education exactly match Triarchy’s approach to the wider field of organization design and management.

NET and Triarchy both:

recognise the need for intellectual rigour
seek out partners at local, regional and national levels
recognise that people who share the same goals and want to make them succeed together are what makes for the best kind of organization.

What happens in education affects us all. Hundreds of thousands of us are involved at some level or other with the educational system – from governments to parents and students of all ages. Businesses, too, are actively involved in attempting to ensure quality of delivery because they want to make sure that tomorrow’s key employees have the best possible skill set and approach to learning.

After the family, school is the first learning organization that we all encounter. Get schooling right, and the concept of the learning organization in the world of work will be a lot easier to engender. This is vitally important to Triarchy.

As Triarchy’s goal is to understand how organizations function - so that we can find ways to make them work better - the values, principles and practices that underpin NET can only add to the knowledge base that we are developing with other partners in our community of readers, thinkers, practitioners and authors.

Triarchy Press’ role in NET

The Triarchy Press website is the home for the informal and formal e-publication of NET’s ideas-in-progress. Triarchy will also publish NET’s articles on education and reports on the outcomes of its projects.

Some of NET’s key people:

Roy Blatchford - Founding Director of NET, Roy has been, for the past three years, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools (HMI) in England, with lead responsibilities for school improvement and for the national inspection of good and outstanding schools.

Roy was founding Principal (1999 – 2003) of Walton High & Walton Learning Centre in Milton Keynes which OFSTED described as an innovative and inspiring centre of learning.

He has served as an LEA-nominated governor on schools under special measures, and been an adviser in Education Action Zones and was Founding Director of Reading Is Fundamental, a non-profit organisation developing children’s reading and family literacy. In 1993 he was invited by the UK Secretary of State for Education to be a Member of the School Curriculum Assessment Authority, under the chairmanship of Lord Dearing and has served on a number of other national working groups in education.

Known internationally for his broadcasts, lectures and educational books on literature and young people’s reading, Roy is the author/editor of over 150 books for pupils, teachers and parents.

Mike Baker was the award-winning Education Correspondent for BBC News 1989-2007. He continues to write regular columns for BBC News Online and The Guardian and broadcasts and presents programmes for Teachers' TV and the BBC. He is a former Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education and is an Honorary Fellow of the College of Teachers.

Ivor Gaber is a national and international media adviser, with wide broadcasting and production experience in television and radio. He is Emeritus Professor of Broadcast Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Research Professor in Media and Politics at the University of Bedfordshire.

Jonathan Harris is Managing Director and founder of Learning Matters, an independent publishing company; he has taken the business to a leading market position since its inception in 1999. He was previously Managing Director of Letts Educational. He has been a chair of school governors, and is chair of the Faith and Foolishness Trust.

Richard Howard is Chair of NET trustees. Formerly Chief Education Adviser in Oxfordshire, his extensive national experience in education includes state/independent schools’ partnerships. Richard is an Honorary Fellow of Oxford Brookes University.

Kevin McGrath is a Chartered Surveyor and is founding and equity partner in Reit Asset Management, which has commercial property in London, Mumbai, Munich, Stockholm and Tel Aviv, and a reputation for breaking new ground in innovative property financing.

Ranjit Sondhi is Chair of Birmingham Primary Care Trust and a governor of the BBC. He was formerly Deputy Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), and is a trustee of the National Gallery.

Kay Symons is Marketing Director of Harcourt Publishers, with significant experience as a schools’ publisher in the UK. She has recently completed an MBA, specialising in e-marketing. She is a school governor and formerly a chair of governors.

Sir David Winkley is a former primary headteacher and author of ‘Handsworth Revolution: the Odyssey of a school’. He founded the National Primary Trust and was a member of the government’s Standards Task Force. He is a fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and visiting professor at Birmingham and Warwick Universities.

More information:

For information on NET activities, on other key players in the NET organization and to share in their first steps, visit www.nationaleducationtrust.net.