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Since January, Mike Lambert has been global education director at Inspired Education, an international schools group with around 95,000 students and 10,000 teachers in 122 schools across 28 countries.

Lambert was principal at Dubai College for 10 years. He has also been a governor at St Catherine’s British School in Athens and co-chair of the Middle East division of independent schools group HMC.

Here, he tells Tes about the challenges and rewards of his typical working week.

Horizon scanning for changes in education, including AI

Artificial intelligence is almost continuously being thought about in the background.

Over the past few years there has been a distinct conversation around the evolving nature of education and the implications for bricks-and-mortar schools. With the advent of ChatGPT’s tutor mode, plenty of thought leaders are saying, “Well, this is it, the fundamental shift in education - it’s all going to change.”

It’s about navigating the balance between the practical realities of running a school as it is now and the possibilities lying ahead in areas such as lesson feedback. The question is whether things are about to change fundamentally or will we simply augment and enhance what we already do? I’m a naturally cautious adopter of educational technology - it’s less about the technology than how you use it.

The recruitment of heads and executive principals

Recruitment might take up to four hours a week: I probably interview for three or four headteacher posts per week. Then there are speculative applications - someone contacting us even though there’s nothing for them at that moment.

Someone might apply for a role in one country where they’re not the right fit, yet they would be perfect in a school elsewhere. One head was interested in a role in Spain, but I could see they would be great for a job in Switzerland. Sometimes that’s about languages, sometimes the demands in different jurisdictions: is the culture more laid-back or highly regulated and hardline?

The Brazilian culture is very familial and friendly - teachers will hug students in the corridor and children run up to their teacher as though they’re extended family. In the UK we’re much more cautious about contact between teachers and students - but if you tried to impose a stand-offish culture in a Brazilian school, I think the parents and students would be confused.

Quality assurance of schools

Quality assurance arrives in fits and starts, but it takes a lot of time overall - sometimes 12 hours a day for six days. Recently I was on a week-long trip to Brazil to visit six schools, quite geographically spread across the country, for full quality-assurance visits - like mini internal inspections.

Quality assurance is probably the primary aspect of my role, but it takes many forms. There’s a lot of collating of global data: we’ve recently created our “global lesson observation dashboard” - a set of seven standards across Inspired’s 122 schools - which informs professional development for all.

Operational check-ins with regional CEOs and the global education team

There are nine Inspired regions, each with a CEO. Nadim Nsouli - Inspired’s founder, chairman and CEO - hosts a weekly meeting with all nine, as well as me and the other functional heads such as the COO and CFO. That takes up most of Monday, sometimes lasting into Tuesday, and helps monitor the global picture. I then meet individually with the regional CEOs on a monthly basis.

The global education team is a lean team of four that meets weekly: me, another education director who specialises in the International Baccalaureate, another in early years education and our head of edtech. We also bring in our regional education leads, as well our timetabling, data and 51���� experts.

School improvement planning

I’ve been trying to create systems that - without standardising the life out of everybody - encourage a standard approach to improvement planning across 122 schools. On an annual basis, we ask schools to do self-evaluation using a very data-informed template.

It’s all interlinked with the quality assurance visits, and there’s a bundle of associated paperwork. I look through this and evaluate whether you’ve made the progress you said you would.

Training and development

We have a “quality of education ecosystem” that starts with a lesson-observation dashboard. Then we produce a 12-month calendar of webinars; some just for heads, some for all teaching staff. Recently we’ve done webinars on the new global lesson-observation dashboard and performance development, and we have upcoming webinars on Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion approach, Tom Bennett’s advice on behaviour management, Dan Olweus’ questionnaire for recording bullying incidents, and the Gatsby benchmarks on careers guidance.

When we conducted a global student survey, it came back that learning was sometimes interrupted or disrupted by other students - so now we have a upcoming webinar to address this.

Personal time

I have two boys aged 11 and 14 who are into sport, so I’ll often watch them play cricket or rugby. As a family we do a lot of sailing off the south coast of England.

We recently had a week in Menorca - the first time in a while that I managed some proper reading, including The Brain at Rest by Joseph Jebelli. He shows that, rather than actively trying to solve a problem, we’re often better off reaching a distracted state to find an answer.

For fiction, I’ve been reading Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt, about two graduates with very different personalities who become young entrepreneurs, trying to set up a business off the north-east coast of Scotland that harnesses the power of waves.

What would I like to do more or less of?

The thing I most enjoy, and when I feeI I have the biggest impact, is physically getting into schools and walking the corridors - going into as many lessons as possible, getting that picture of the quality of teaching and learning, and sitting down for discussions with the head.

Obviously, with 122 schools across the globe, I don’t spend as much time as I’d like doing that - we have a lot of screen-based conversations with heads and CEOs, but it’s never quite the same.

Mike Lambert was talking to Henry Hepburn

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