About Graham Brown-Martin

Graham Brown-Martin is an engaging catalyst for powerful conversations and fresh thinking. Graham draws on his experiences of leading teams, creating startups and scaling up organisations that challenge the status quo. Consistently ahead of the curve: he designed mobile computers in the 80s, interactive and online entertainment networks in the 90s, community-based social networks in the 2000s and a global forum for the future of learning in the 2010s. He takes his audience on an interactive journey that motivates them to think differently about the past, present and future.

In 2004, Brown-Martin founded Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global community bringing together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. His book, Learning {Re}imagined, a study of global education and geopolitics produced for the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), was published by Bloomsbury in 2015.

Graham is the founder of Beyond Tomorrow Global, a growing international intelligence network of interdisciplinary thinkers designing a blueprint for society to thrive beyond the 22nd century. He is co-founder of regenerative.global, a transformative learning consultancy based in London and New York using circular economy principles to inform innovative learning and design practices.

Brown-Martin has in recent years given evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, created an agile learning experience for senior leaders of a FTSE 100 financial services company, designed a science programme for primary school children using the Internet of Things, created an experiential programme for children to learn about working with autonomous humanoid robots and was retained by an educational technology maker to lead their global product and brand development, education and communications strategy with teams in the UK, US and China.

Graham is a co-founder of WORDS & EARS, a London-based strategic insight and leadership coaching practice established in 2012 to help organisations and their leaders navigate the future, achieve their goals and maintain resilience.

About Charles Leadbeater

Charles Leadbeater works with entrepreneurs, governments, cities and foundations around the world on to promote innovation with purpose.

Over the past ten years he has published a string of influential reports on the changes needed in education to equip students with the agency needed for a world of rapid transitions. In Learning from the Extremes he explored how way social entrepreneurs are using technology to create new approaches to learning in the poorest parts of the developing world. The Problem Solvers examines the skills young people will need to thrive in an uncertain, creative and entrepreneurial economy in which machines with artificial intelligence may well be capable of doing many routine jobs.

Charles was an adviser in Tony Blair’s government Policy Unit on the knowledge driven economy. He drafted the UK Government’s White Paper – Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy, one of the first policy papers in the world to argue that advanced economies would become increasingly dependent upon innovation for growth. He went on to advise a range of governments on long term strategy. As a visiting Professor at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose he advised the British government and the European Union on how to organize innovation to meet big societal challenges through his work on a commission on Mission Oriented Innovation.

He is the author of several internationally renowned books, among them Living on Thin Air, which explores the rise of the knowledge driven economy and We-Think: mass innovation not mass production, which examines how the web was enabling creative collaboration across a wide range of fields. His book, The Frugal Innovator, is an account of how lean, simple, clean and social self-help innovations are providing new solutions in health, energy, water and housing in the developing world. He was one of the first people in the world to write about social entrepreneurship in his 1997 report The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur.

Accenture, the management consultancy ranked him one of the top management thinkers in the world, and the Financial Times said he was the outstanding innovation expert in the UK. He is a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in London.

About Zack Kass

Zack Kass stands out as one of the brightest minds in AI today, with a robust 14-year journey at the epicenter of technological evolution. His significant tenure as Head of Go To Market at OpenAI put him front and center building AI strategies with many of the biggest companies in the world. His role in converting state of the art research into real-world business applications has positioned him as one the the foremost thinkers in Applied AI.

His mission is to ensure that societies in general, businesses, civil organisations and governments are active participants in the AI-powered future, equipped to enable a future of abundance. Zack aims to do this by demystifying AI, making it accessible and understandable for everyone, and helping leaders navigate the rapidly evolving environment.

Beyond the corporate world, Zack is a staunch advocate for AI’s potential to revolutionize education. He works tirelessly to promote AI as a tool that can significantly enhance free and unlimited access to knowledge. His efforts seek to guarantee that the advancements in AI transcend commercial benefits and work towards the betterment of communities and societies at large.

About Sugata Mitra

Prof. Sugata Mitra is one of the world’s most respected education researchers and pioneer in self-directed learning. He is Professor Emeritus at NIIT University Rajasthan India, has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, and he retired in 2019 as Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, UK.

His interests include Children’s Education, Remote Learning, Self- organising systems, Cognitive Systems, Complex Dynamical Systems, Physics and Consciousness.

He conducted the Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiment, where in the year 1999 a computer was embedded within a wall in an Indian slum at Kalkaji, Delhi and children were allowed to freely use it. The experiment aimed at proving that kids could be taught computers very easily without any formal training. Sugata termed this as Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). The experiment has since been repeated at many places. He is the recipient of many awards and honorary doctorates from India, the UK, USA and many other countries in the world.

The Hole in the Wall experiment has left a mark on popular culture. Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup read about Mitra’s experiment and was inspired to write his debut novel that went on to become the Oscar winning movie of 2009 – Slumdog Millionaire.

He is credited with more than 25 inventions in the area of cognitive science and educational technology. He was conferred the prestigious Dewang Mehta Award from the Government of India for Innovation in Information Technology in the year 2003. Amongst many other awards, he was awarded the 1-million-dollar TED Prize in 2013.

Professor Mitra’s work at NIIT created the first curricula and pedagogy for that organisation, followed by years of research on learning styles, learning devices, several of them now patented, multimedia and new methods of learning. Culminating and, perhaps, towering over his previous work, are his “hole in the wall” experiments with children’s learning. Since 1999, he has convincingly demonstrated that groups of children, irrespective of who or where they are, can learn to use computers and the Internet on their own using public computers in open spaces such as roads and playgrounds. He brought these results to England in 2006 and invented Self Organised Learning Environments, now in use throughout the world. In 2009, he created the Granny Cloud, of teachers who interact with children over the Internet.

Since the 1970s, Professor Mitra’s publications and work has resulted in training and development of perhaps a million young Indians, amongst them some of the poorest children in the world.

In 2013, he was awarded the first $1 million TED prize, to put his educational ideas together to create seven laboratories called ‘Schools in the Cloud’. Here he studied learning as emergent phenomena in an educational self-organising system. These results question the ideas of curriculum, examinations and the meaning of ‘knowing’ itself in the Internet world of the 21st century.

He was named the 2022 Brock Prize in Education Innovation Laureate for his transformational work in rethinking the way children learn.

About Cami Anderson

Cami Anderson, Founder and CEO of ThirdWay Solutions

I worry deeply about this incredibly dysfunctional story we tell ourselves that we have to solve poverty before we can create excellent schools, and that young people should be doomed to terrible schools as a result of poverty. Poverty impacts students’ readiness to learn and their home life. But I have schools in Newark where you can go to three different 5^th grade classrooms and see radically different results. And studies have shown that being even in a mediocre teacher’s classroom vs an excellent teacher’s classroom leads to radically different educational outcomes, let alone a really bad teacher vs an excellent teacher. Schools in the same neighbourhood, with kids from the same social class, with the same challenges, get dramatically different results. There are schools and teachers that are showing that education excellence is absolutely attainable and as a result of that are able to break intergenerational cycles of poverty. But it is the exception and not the rule. And if it can happen anywhere, it should happen everywhere. And I am so worried we don’t believe it!

Great teachers can have a humongous effect on children.

Cami Anderson is a passionate and an established leader in education reform who has spent more than 30 years relentlessly cutting through outdated systems and brass-knuckle politics to push change. In that time, she has taken on roles from teacher to non-profit executive to system-wide administrator. She has coached over 25 CEOs to attain previously unthinkable goals. She served for more than a decade as Superintendent of schools, first in New York City and then in Newark, putting in place key reforms that have led to notable increases in outcomes for all students in the once-struggling district. She was responsible for accelerating innovation, initiating public private partnerships at unprecedented levels, and setting a new national model for the transformation of urban education in America. She received wide-scale recognition for her work with the city’s most struggling students.

Anderson also served as executive director of Teach for America New York, where she founded a board of business and education leaders, increased teacher quality, and launched Teach for America Week. She also served as Chief Program Officer for New Leaders for New Schools, which was recognized by Harvard Business School, Education Week, the US Department of Education, and the Teaching Commission as one of the most effective principal preparation programs in the country.

Ms. Anderson also boasts a diverse background as a Montessori educator, youth theatre director and athlete. She has been recognized for her dedication to expanding educational opportunities and empowering youth throughout her career. Anderson was nominated for a national Teacher of the Year award, received the Peter Jennings Award for her impact on educational equity, belongs to the Aspen Global Leader Network, and was recently named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People.”

About Peter Senge

Throughout his career, Peter has been asking, “how do we create the conditions for people to work together at their best, cultivating the innate systems intelligence that is our birthright but is all but lost in modern culture?” Schools That Learn describes how schools can adapt, grow, and change in the face of the increasing demands and challenges of our society, and provides tools, techniques and solutions for teachers and school principals.

Senior Lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, and Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), Peter Senge has been at the forefront of organizational learning, leadership development and systems change since his classic text The Fifth Discipline, which sold over two million copies worldwide. It was recognized by the Financial Times as one of five “most important” management books and by Harvard Business Review as establishing the learning organization as “one of the seminal ideas of the last 75 years.”

About Vicky Colbert

Colbert is a Sociologist from Javeriana University in Colombia and pursued her graduate studies in Sociology of Education at Stanford University in the United States.

Vicky Colbert is founder and director of Fundación Escuela Nueva. She is co-author of the worldwide renowned Escuela Nueva model and was its first National Coordinator. Colbert has pioneered, expanded and sustained this educational innovation from many organisational spheres: as Viceminister of Education of Colombia, UNICEF´s Education Adviser for LAC and now from Fundación Escuela Nueva (FEN), an NGO she founded to ensure its quality, sustainability and innovation.

A key element of the Escuela Nueva school is that children learn at their own rate by using Learning Guide, which Colbert describes as “a combination of a textbook, workbook and a guide for the teacher.” These guides suggest hands-on activities for students to do both in school and at home. Students work their way through the guide at their own pace, with teachers serving as advisers, and students who have mastered a lesson often helping those who have not. The model is highly empowering for children and youth, while making learning relevant to their needs and flexible in terms of schedule and availability of resources.

She has been recognized with several awards and distinctions in the fields of leadership and social entrepreneurship, such as the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the Clinton Global Citizenship Award and the Kravis Prize. She has also been recognized as Outstanding Social Entrepreneur by the Schwab Foundation, Ashoka and the World Technology Network. She is laureate of the first edition of the Yidan Prize for Education Development (2017) and 2013 WISE Prize for Education Laureate.

About John Hattie

Educational researcher, author, specialist in Visible Learning, an educational approach focused on identifying and maximising the factors that positively influence learning, John Hattie has behind him over twenty years of study, the largest collection of research based on evidence and involving millions of students. His studies are the benchmark for any educator who wants to know what actually works in schools to accelerate learning.

Professor John Hattie, originally from New Zealand, has held the position of Professor and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute, since March 2011. Prior to this role, he served as a Professor of Educational Sciences at the University of Auckland, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the University of Western Australia. Widely recognized for his books, international conferences, and significant influence on educational policy, Hattie has established himself as a leading figure and thought leader in the realm of contemporary education.