Partner, Public First and Head of Education Practice. Education strategy + policy advisory. From Brownite to Willetsian. “University lobbyist 👎” - CCHQ
Aug 2 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
A story, on the back of this tweet. It’s about why Natasha is a star, I’m an idiot, and why government procurement and lawyers are even more so
In 2015, Natasha and I were working together at Policy Exchange. She said to me that she had an idea for a start up social enterprise that would do for prison officers what Teach First had done for teachers, and other start up schemes similarly elsewhere in the public sector.
May 18 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
An extended case study on why this is a self defeating argument - using Teesside University, which Simon is rightly very proud of.
(All of the below is taken from extensive work we did alongside @TeessideUni in 2022. Link is here )publicfirst.co.uk/wp-content/upl…
Apr 17, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Maths to 18, a 🧵 from I suspect about its only advocate…..
1. The policy case for this is really strong. The PM will cite a lot of this evidence later. Almost no one disagrees with this (I think?)
Jan 2, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Anyway, nice to see Dominic Cummings reinventing the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and Delivery Unit
The job ad blog is fascinating. He’s dead right - who are the 1 in 10,000 experts out there in any sorts of fields, and why aren’t they working for government, even for a short stint?
Jun 23, 2019 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The key thing is to secure a “reopening of the WA”. Put all your new PM political capital into persuading the EU27 to do that with the implicit / explicit promise that nothing substantive will be changed.
Make a series of re-naming changes. Change the backstop to a protocol which will be reviewed at x date. Rebadge the 39bn so its profiled more accurately over the many many years it will be paid.
Apr 27, 2019 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
How f—g stupid is this; let me count the ways buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/hi…
Firstly, international students are hugely popular. In fact only 1/4 of the public thinks of them as immigrants and the majority of people want more of them and for them to stay after graduation universitiesuk.ac.uk/news/Pages/New…
Feb 3, 2019 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Why DfE Only Talks To A Few People: And Why This Isn’t Really About London
(A giant subtweet of people moaning about Ark)
Most fundamentally, this stems from a misconception about how to engage with government. Ironically given a lot of people with edu expertise moan that govt doesn’t respect that, this misconception comes because people don’t recognise policymaking / influencing policy is a skill
