Catherine is passionately committed to improving the ability of education to change the lives of disadvantaged children.
In 2011, she co-founded Challenge Partners, a national school improvement network with 230 schools across England that improves pupil outcomes through schools working with and learning from each other. A year later, she worked with Challenge Partners schools to set up Challenge the Gap – a high impact programme that enabled children from low income families to make five terms of progress in three which has grown rapidly to include over 100 schools, 500 staff and 40,000 pupils nationally.
Catherine founded New Schools Ventures to raise the attainment of children from low income families by creating chains of exceptional primary schools in areas of high deprivation. Its first school, Southwark Primary Free School opened in London in 2012. For this, she was awarded UnLtd’s Millennium Award “for exceptional social entrepreneurs with vision, passion, drive and commitment, who want to change the world for the better”.
Previously, Catherine led the development of strategies to improve the effectiveness of ARK Schools, a UK school operator delivering “Absolute Returns” for children in low income areas. This included their turnaround strategy, growth strategy and network strategy. She also spent six years leading the implementation and scaling up of UK government policies such as Every Child Matters and Targeted Youth Support and the national School Improvement Planning Framework, which was used by 10,000 schools across the country.
In the early 1990s, Catherine worked as a secondary English and Mathematics teacher in Kisii, Kenya. While in East Africa, she was asked for help by the community on Nsazi Island, Uganda, where children were unable to access any education, working with them for two years to set up a primary school.
Catherine has a degree from Oxford University and an MBA with Distinction from London Business School.