Michael Barber (educationist)


Sir Michael Blaydon Barber is a British educationist and founder and chairman of Delivery Associates, an advisory firm focussed on working with governments and other organisations to help them deliver improved outcomes for citizens. He is a global expert on implementation of large-scale system change, a leading authority on education systems and education reform, and was knighted in 2005 for his contributions to improving government.
Barber has worked for over 20 years in education and government reform and improvement. During that time, he has advised governments in over 60 countries on issues of public policy and delivery. He was the founder and first head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit under Prime Minister Tony Blair, and later served as Chief Education Advisor at Pearson, and as a partner at McKinsey, where he was head of the global education practice. He currently serves as Co-Chair of Boston Consulting Group's not-for-profit foundation, Centre for Public Impact;; he has been a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and he was recently appointed as Chair of the Office for Students – the proposed new regulator for Higher Education in the UK. He recently published How to Run a Government: So that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t go Crazy.

Education and early career

Barber was educated at Bootham School, York, an independent school with a Quaker background and ethos. He read History at the University of Oxford before training as a teacher. He taught in schools in Britain and Zimbabwe.
Barber worked in the education department of the National Union of Teachers. As a member of the Labour Party, he was elected to the council of the London Borough of Hackney, becoming chair of the education committee. In 1987 he contested for Labour the seat of Henley-on-Thames, then held by Michael Heseltine.

Government

Barber served as Chief Adviser to the Secretary of State for Education on School Standards during the first term of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, from 1997 to 2001.
During Blair's second term, from 2001 to 2005, Barber served as the Chief Adviser on Delivery, reporting directly to Prime Minister Tony Blair. As head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, he was responsible for working with government agencies to ensure successful implementation of the Prime Minister's priority programs, including those in health, education, transport, policing, the criminal justice system, and asylum/immigration. He wrote a book about his experience in the PMDU. Instruction to Deliver: Fighting to Reform Britain’s Public Services, It was described by the Financial Times as "one of the best books about British Government for many years".
Barber is currently the Government's preferred candidate to chair the soon-to-be-established Office for Students.

Delivery Associates

Barber is the Founder and Chairman of Delivery Associates, the leading public sector advisory group focused on implementation of large-scale reform and establishment of delivery units. It applies the Science of Delivery across all 6 continents to achieve step-change in citizen outcomes across education, health, economic development, infrastructure and other areas of government.

At McKinsey and Company

Following his time leading the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, Barber served as partner and head of McKinsey's Global Education Practice. While at McKinsey, Barber co-authored two major education reports: How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better and How the world’s best-performing schools come out on top.
During this time, Barber continued to work on management in the public sector, and published Deliverology 101 in 2011 to serve as a comprehensive guide to system reform and delivery. Governments and large public organisations adopted elements of the 'deliverology' approach. Additionally, a number of international organizations including the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank, DFID, and the IMF sought his advice and guidance.
Barber also served as co-chair of the Pakistan Education Taskforce, as DFID Special Representative on Education for Pakistan. He has now made more than fifty visits to Pakistan, where he continues to serve as an advisor on system reform to the Chief Minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif. This work led to the development of the 'Punjab Roadmap, with ambitious goals to increase the quality of education offered at all 60,000 schools in the Punjab. The Good News from Pakistan, published in 2013 with Reform, summarises the change achieved between August 2011 and January 2013. These include:
The Independent Commission on Aid Impact has praised the Roadmap as "an excellent example of how a well-designed monitoring system can be integral to the design of a reform programme".

Education Delivery Institute

In the summer of 2010, Barber teamed with leaders from the Education Trust and Achieve to found the U.S. Education Delivery Institute. Between 2010 and 2016, this Institute worked with leaders of K-12 and higher education systems around the United States to adapt the delivery concept pioneered by Barber in the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit to drive American education reform efforts.

Chief Education Advisor, Pearson

From September 2011 to March 2017, Barber was Chief Education Advisor at Pearson. In this role, he led the company's worldwide research and partnership on education policy, and learning methods, advised on and supported the innovation and development of new products and services, and led Pearson's strategy for education in the poorest sectors of the world, particularly in fast-growing developing economies.

Efficacy

Barber was responsible for Pearson's detailed research and experimentation on what works in education, and how to demonstrate the effectiveness of different approaches, services and materials. This initiative was a major component of the company's global commitment to proven improvement in learning outcomes and applies across all investments and acquisitions.

Pearson Affordable Learning Fund

Barber chaired the Pearson Affordable Learning Fund. Announced in July 2012, The Pearson Affordable Learning Fund is a venture fund with $65M of capital that invests in private schools, education technology, and scalable services to meet the demand for affordable education in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. PALF seeks investments with market returns while demonstrating outsized learning outcomes. In 2016, PALF had 10 portfolio companies across 6 countries, averaging 140% revenue growth in that year.
The fund's first investment was in an affordable Ghanaian school chain, Omega Schools, headed by Ken Donkoh and Professor James Tooley. In the first four months of the investment, Omega Schools expanded from 10 schools serving 6,000 students to 20 schools serving 11,000.

Oceans of Innovation

In August 2012, Barber published Oceans of Innovation with Katelyn Donnelly and Saad Rizvi about the rise of Pacific Asia and the implications for global leadership and education. They laid out the need for whole system revolutions in education, which combine whole system reform and systemic innovation.

The Learning Curve

In November 2012, Barber launched The Learning Curve. The Learning Curve was commissioned by Pearson from the Economist Intelligence Unit to work with some of the world's leading education experts to review, research, and interview innovators from every continent about how best to achieve better learning outcomes.
It established the first ever open and searchable global education data bank - drawing on the world's best existing data-sets including the PISA, TIMMS and PIRLS studies. It is one of the most comprehensive and accessible sets of data on learning that exists.

An Avalanche is Coming

In March 2013, Barber published An Avalanche is Coming with Katelyn Donnelly and Saad Rizvi about the upcoming revolution in global higher education. They described the 'unbundling' of higher education and called on university leaders to change

The Incomplete Guide to Delivering Learning Outcomes

This publication, co-authored with Saad Rizvi, introduces Pearson's journey towards putting efficacy at the heart of the company, and the lessons learned in the process that anyone passionate about delivering outcomes or transforming a company can apply. It describes the "Efficacy Framework," a way to evaluate and improve impact on learning outcomes, and sets out the company's strategy, initiatives and insights in applying it. It also outlines how Pearson will ensure that the efficacy is applied throughout the company, reviewing all investments and acquisitions over a value of $1m, reporting publicly on Pearson's impact and making it a central pillar of every major decision.

Asking More: The Path to Efficacy

This publication, edited by Barber and Saad Rizvi, brings together articles from some of the world's leading education practitioners and business people to highlight the urgent opportunity for a global focus on outcomes in education. It explores how research and data collection can enable a revolutionary degree of rigour in measuring and improving the success of learning products and educational programmes. The authors consider priorities and barriers to learning outcomes and suggest possible solutions on the path to efficacy. Contributions by: Geoff Mulgan, NESTA, Barbara Chow, Hewlett Foundation, John Iwata, IBM, Vicky Colbert, Escuela Nueva Foundation, Rukmini Banerji, Pratham Schools, Michael C. Crow, Arizona State University, Andreas Schleicher, OECD, Sir Ken Robinson, education, arts and creativity expert, Peter Hill, former CEO of Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority

Honorary degrees

Barber has been a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Graduate School of Education and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Exeter and Nottingham Trent University.

Publications