He was appointed OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2020 for services to education.
Born in the Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe and brought up between there and Blackpool as part of a "big, complicated, non-nuclear family".
He went on to become a policy adviser at the Department for Education, then North East Regional Director at Teach First, before becoming assistant head at Morecambe's Heysham High School (now Bay Leadership Academy).
In 2015 he founded the Institute for Teaching, a charity focused on developing and improving teachers' expertise.
In March 2018 the Institute for Teaching merged with Ambition School Leadership to become Ambition Institute,[6] an education charity tackling educational disadvantage through evidence-based professional development for teachers and school leaders.