EPI is delighted to announce new appointments to our Board of Trustees.
Professor Sir Chris Husbands, Professor Tim Leunig and Anne-Marie Canning MBE will be joining as Trustees from 1st April 2024. In addition, Hardip Begol CBE will be joining as a Trustee from 1st May 2024.
They will join existing Trustees, Rt Hon David Laws (chair), Baroness Sally Morgan, Charles Brand and Dr Kitty Stewart on the Board.
Biographies for each of the new Trustees can be found below and a full list of EPI’s current Trustees can be found here.
Hardip Begol CBE: Hardip is a Board Member at the qualifications and exams regulator, Ofqual, and a non-executive Director at Oak National Academy, which supports teachers to teach, and pupils to access, a high-quality curriculum.
Hardip spent nearly two decades at the Department of Education where his responsibilities as a senior civil servant included: special educational needs and disability; curriculum, qualifications and accountability; independent education; and safeguarding and counter-extremism. From 2017-19, he was Director of Integration and Communities at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. After leaving the civil service, he was CEO of Woodard Academies Trust from 2020-22.
Earlier in his career, Hardip trained as a chartered accountant at Deloitte, was a public services consultant at KPMG Consulting and worked at the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. He is a member, and former trustee, of Eden Academy Trust, a leading special school multi-academy trust.
Professor Sir Chris Husbands: Chris has spent all his career in Education, with posts at the Institute of Education, Warwick and East Anglia. He was Director of the Institute for Education (2011-2016) and led the merger with UCL in 2014. He was Vice Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University from 2016 to 2023. He has served on a number of education boards including: Training and Development Agency for Schools, Edexcel, AQA, Universities UK, Sheffield College. In 2017, he became Chair of the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency, and Chair of the Doncaster Opportunity Area Board.
Professor Tim Leunig: Tim is a Professor of Economics at the LSE. He has occupied a range of Policy Adviser jobs at the DFE/DEFRA/DCLG/HMT and DOH, between 2012 and 2023. He also served as Chief Scientific Adviser at the DFE between 2014 and 2017, and was Adviser to the Prime Minister on Education in 2023. He is now a Director at Public First and Chief Economist at Onward think-tank.
Anne-Marie Canning MBE: Anne-Marie Canning MBE is from Doncaster, was the first in her family to go to university and has dedicated her career to opening up educational opportunity to the next generation.
Anne-Marie is the Chief Executive Officer of The Brilliant Club, a UK-wide university access charity focused on increasing the number of less advantaged students accessing the most competitive universities and supporting them to succeed when they get there. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to higher education.
In recent years Anne-Marie was the independent chair of the Department for Education’s Bradford Opportunity Area. Opportunity Areas supported social mobility in the 12 areas of the country where it is most challenged. She now leads a broad-based coalition of organisations in Bradford who are working together to improve opportunities for young people in the city – the Education Alliance for Life Chances.
Between 2012 and 2019 Anne-Marie was the Director of Social Mobility and Student Success at King’s College London. In this role she founded an award-winning parental engagement endeavour called Parent Power. Anne-Marie has previously worked at University College Oxford and holds a University of Oxford Teaching Award. She studied at the University of York and served a sabbatical term as the president of the students’ union.
Anne-Marie is also a trustee of the Child Poverty Action Group
