School partnerships alliance
Our Trustees
S.P.A. benefits from the wealth of knowledge and experience of its trustees, advisory board and operational staff, who are drawn together from across many sectors. What they all share is a passionate belief in the power of partnerships.
Tom Arbuthnott
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Tom is Deputy Head (Partnerships) at Eton College, responsible for the schools’ work on public benefit and social mobility, particularly through overseeing the bursary programme, state school partnerships, and the agency that students develop to social and environmental ends. Tom was a former Chair of the Schools Together Group and was active in raising the initial seed funding for S.P.A.
Tom has been developing thinking and ideas about partnership working for more than a decade, and instituted and edited the first two collections in the ‘Partnerships in Practice’ series: ‘All Together Now’ (which focused on music partnerships) and ‘The Missing 2000’ about preparing young people for top-tier university entry.
Sarah Butterworth
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Sarah is the Director of Schools at the educational charity Royal National Children’s Springboard Foundation which secures transformational bursaries for young people at independent and state boarding schools across the nation. Previously she ran partnerships for Highgate School and project managed the opening of the London Academy of Excellence in Tottenham in 2017—a sixth form free school with nine independent schools and Tottenham Hotspur Football Club in the partnership.
Jodh Dhesi
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Jodh is Chief Executive Officer of the Schools of King Edward VI in Birmingham (a Foundation Charity operating two independent schools with a multi-million pound endowment) and Accounting Officer of King Edward VI Academy Trust, Birmingham, which operates ten 11-16 academies. These two entities work together under the name of King Edward VI Foundation, Birmingham, known as “the Foundation”.
Jodh is accountable for the leadership, educational outcomes, financial and risk management, organisational development, governance and ambassadorship of the Foundation which educates 11,000+ students and employs 1700+ members of staff.
He is also a School Improvement Partner for the Arthur Terry Learning Partnership.
Nicki Mattin
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Nicki is Principal of Thurston Community College. She has over 30 years’ experience of working in schools and believes that they should equip their students with the confidence, competence, knowledge, skills and understanding to fit easily and actively into a rapidly changing society. Partnership working is critical to this.
During her career she has worked on projects that have had influence locally, nationally and internationally. This has included being the school lead on an EU- funded project “Improving the Quality of Education in Iraq” with the British Council and Iraqi government, focused on helping to rebuild the Iraq school system and community using a model of school to school support.
At a local level Nicki was a founding member of East Kent Schools Together (EKST) an innovative state-independent school partnership, in which each school contributes and draws from the partnership on an equal footing for the benefit of all.
Julie Robinson
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Julie is CEO of the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the trade body representing associations across independent education in the UK – more than 1400 schools. ISC provides national-level research, communications and lobbying for the sector.
Julie spent more than 11 years in headship roles, and is a Governor at both a City of London Academy and an independent school in London.
Leo Winkley
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Leo has been Headmaster at Shrewsbury School since 2018. He is also the Chair of the Board of Trustees at Shrewsbury House (The Shewsy) and Governor at Prestfelde School. Leo previously served as Chair of the City of York ISSP, Chair of the Boarding Schools Association and Headmaster at St. Peter’s School in York from 2010-2018.
Leo has more than 12 years of experience in partnership work. He helped found the S.P.A. in order to extend opportunities to promote life chances for young people and share mutually beneficial experience and expertise across sectors for the benefit of children and progress.