Strategic Advisors
Tanya Barron
Tanya is the Chief Executive of Plan International UK. Starting out as a special needs teacher, and then a lecturer in Politics and Philosophy, Tanya entered the international development sector in 1989 as Head of Programmes for Eastern Europe and former Soviet countries at VSO. She went on to senior roles at the European Children’s Trust, Home-Start International and Leonard Cheshire Disability. From 1995-2002 Tanya was Chair of a UNICEF NGO Committee in Geneva, she is currently a Board Member of the World Bank’s Global Partnership on Disability and Development and in 2003 she was given the European Woman of Achievement (Humanitarian) award.
Alex Nairn
Alex spent six years as Programme Director for the Training and Development Agency for Schools, where he led major government school improvement programmes across all 22,000 schools and 150 Local Authorities in England. He is an experienced change management consultant, facilitator and qualified coach and has held several board positions in commercial environments including HR Director at WHSmith. Since 2010 Alex has been working with the Maasai in Northern Laikipia, Kenya, supervising the project management, building, marketing and operation of a new luxury safari camp.
Richard Ogdon
Richard has spent over 20 years in the investment banking and private equity industry, principally focused on developing markets. In the 1990s he founded UBS Warburg’s Moscow office and pioneered many milestones in the development of Russia’s capital markets, as well as advising Russia’s post Soviet government from 1992 on the restructuring of its foreign debt. He has held board positions at Troika Dialog, Uralsib, OTKRITIE Securities, AVTOVAZ, KAMAZ, High River Gold Mines and Russian Direct Investment Fund. He is currently advising Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund on direct investment.
Education Partners
Scholé’s model draws extensively on the best of UK education practice. We do this through through strong relationships with some of the UK’s leading networks of schools and leadership trainers.
Challenge Partners is the UK’s foremost school improvement network founded by the team that led the London Challenge. It is a UK charity, owned and led by schools, who work together to lead school improvement. It believes that when schools are working in partnership to continually improve their practice, an excellence education for pupils will be achieved. Challenge Partners is made up of over 300 schools. Scholé has created a pool of senior leaders from Challenge Partners’ schools, who are interested in becoming School Development Directors as we scale up.
Olevi works to drive up standards in the quality of teaching in schools nationally and around the world, create a successful teaching and learning culture that leaves a lasting legacy and ensure all schools become centres of excellence in the enhancement of teaching and pedagogic leadership, improving learning outcomes for all. It delivers this through a range of teacher training and professional development programmes, having trained almost 3,000 programme facilitators in over 1,000 facilitator schools across the UK and abroad. Olevi has granted Scholé free access to all its training materials and is actively recruiting Specialists from its network of outstanding teachers.
Investment Partners
Pansophic is a growing leader in education, operating schools and educational programs around the world that span the life of a student from early learning to higher education. Its learning solutions include high quality content, technology, instruction and exceptional facilities. It currently has several operations across the United States, Switzerland, and the Middle East. Its technology allows it to serve students in a variety of modalities including online, brick and mortar schools, and blended options. Its Higher Education division partners with universities to help them implement online learning solutions in a traditional college environment.
The ADvTECH Group, a JSE-listed company, is Africa’s largest private education provider and a continental leader in quality education, training, skills development and placement services. The Group owns 9 tertiary brands operating from 29 campuses across South Africa and the rest of Africa. Its higher education division, The Independent Institute of Education, is South Africa’s largest and most accredited private higher education provider. ADvTECH’s Schools division comprises 7 brands with 94 schools across Africa, including Gaborone International School in Botswana and Crawford International in Nairobi, Kenya. Its 9 resourcing brands place thousands of candidates annually, assisting graduates to make the transition from the world of study to the world of work.
Caerus Capital LLC is an investment and advisory firm that focuses on healthcare and education businesses in emerging and frontier markets. Caerus provides long-term risk capital with sector-specific expertise to the private healthcare and education sectors in emerging and frontier markets. Caerus’s geographic focus is in regions like Africa and South Asia, where economic growth is high, demographics are favorable, and healthcare and education are undersupplied. Its investment strategy is focused on scaling standardized, high-volume businesses that serve the growing mass markets.