Dr Ian Hadden

My road into academic research was more winding than most, but it means that I’ve learned something about helping organisations make changes that stick. I hope to bring my experience of hands-on, sleeves-rolled-up organisational change to the School Inclusion Group.

My role here is to support schools in the very practical challenge of creating, implementing and evaluating a plan that will make a real difference to the experience and outcomes of many of their students.

Having been a teacher of English in Rome and a software engineer in my twenties, I spent my thirties and forties helping large organisations make quite complex changes to their operations. After getting a solid grounding with PwC on commercial jobs like post-acquisition integration and new product rollout, I joined the National Remodelling Team in the noughties. The older hands among you might remember us supporting the Department for Education in delivering Extended Services provision to schools, which included the dreadfully-named Disadvantage Subsidy.

The subsidy was a kind of precursor to the pupil premium, and brought me face to face with the challenges that school students from low-income families face. I was responsible for working with a pilot group of local authorities, school clusters and schools to jointly develop the tools and processes that we then rolled out nationally to help schools turn the funding into practical action on the ground.

One thing led to another and I ended up doing a Masters in behavioural science at the LSE, after which Matt persuaded me to do a PhD at Sussex. This turned out to be a good idea. My research focused on finding ways to help schools understand the specific issues that were holding back some of their students, and then using that knowledge to develop the most effective intervention to help them. It was a nice example of there being nothing so practical as a good theory.

Our work in the School Inclusion Group follows on directly from this. My motivation is not so much to advance research myself, but to combine my understanding of the research of others with my experience of organisational change to make a practical difference to the lives of as many young people as possible.