Hywel Roberts

Hywel has been a teacher for over thirty years and is widely recognised for his innovative work in model teaching and curriculum design. Since stepping beyond the full-time classroom, he has advised and inspired educators from Barnsley to Brussels, Cairo to Cleethorpes. Equally at home addressing hundreds of Headteachers or working with EAL pupils on the classroom carpet, Hywel brings warmth, humour and deep expertise to everything he does. An experienced teacher across Special, Primary and Secondary settings, both in the UK and overseas, he is also a respected author and regular contributor to national educational publications.

Hywel will be speaking at the Teach Yorkshire event on:
Botheredness: making learning matter
How do you get children bothered about Vikings, if they haven’t got a bed?How do we communicate passion for our subjects?
How do we teach with passion, ingenuity, and joy?

David Whitaker

Dave is the Chief Education Officer for  Wellspring Academy Trust. As a former Executive Principal, he now works regionally supporting all 33 schools in the trust. This includes mainstream primary, secondary, special and alternative provision academies.

As well as Executive Headship, Dave spent 10 years as a  National Leader of Education and teaching school head. He now leads Positive Regard - the trust’s behaviour training and outreach team. Dave works nationally supporting schools with behaviour training, drawing on years of experience working with the most complex and vulnerable of children. Based on an ethos of ‘unconditional positive regard’ Dave believes schools should use relational practice to make them safe and caring places to learn.

He is a regular speaker at conferences and an active campaigner for educational change. His recently published, best selling book, The Kindness Principle, offers advice, guidance and expertise on making relational practice work in schools.  He is also an associate of Independent Thinking Ltd.

Keziah Featherstone

Punk Leadership - how to Smash It Up

We're always great at celebrating the amazing work teachers and school leaders do every single day. However, often this is because we feel our enthusiasm is being straight-jacketed with the expectation that we all have to conform. 

There is an alternative to the flat-packed one-size-fits-all approach often expected - but that never works. Keziah, author of Punk Leadership; current executive trust leader and former executive headteacher; co-chair of the Headteachers Roundtable and co-founder and chair of WomenEd is here to explain that yes, you can smash up those expectations.

Bronte Mckeown

Bronte is a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Teaching (NIoT) with a background in psychology, neuroscience, and data science. Her early research explored how differences in brain activity patterns shape the ways people think, before moving into applied education analytics. Over the past two years at the NIoT, Bronte has led work identifying areas that need support most ("cold spots"), evaluating teacher recruitment methods (including online versus in-person interviewing), and designing better pre-interview support for applicants. Her research has also examined how feedback literacy develops over time among trainees and early career teachers. She now leads the AI strand of the Teaching Improvement through Data and Evaluation (TIDE) project, focused on using data and human-centred AI to support high-quality mentoring and professional development.

 Compass Education