Our Board of Trustees has overarching legal responsibility and accountability for Lift’s schools. Their role is to set and monitor strategic objectives, plus compliance with charity and company law and the Trust’s funding agreement.
Register of business interests
We hold register of business interests for all trustees & members and we are obliged to declare the interests of trustees & members on our website. The document can be viewed here: Register of interest
Board Attendance
For information on Trustee attendance of board meetings, click here.
Jude is a chartered accountant with extensive commercial and international experience gained from a 30-year career with KPMG, 16 years of which as a partner in the London office. His experience includes auditing and advising on mergers, acquisitions and stock exchange listings, for public and private companies. Following his retirement from KPMG, he took the decision to focus his work in the Public Sector and in particular, Education and Health with a combination of voluntary and non executive work. Jude is chair of SSAT (The Schools Network) Ltd, an education services provider and a non-executive director and Deputy Chair of Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust where he also chairs the audit and risk committee. Jude has a degree in biochemistry, is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a Freeman of the City of London.
Dr Ann Ewing has held a range of executive and non-executive roles. She held executive roles with BP and HSBC before moving to Ark, the children's charity, in 2010. She now consults with a range of clients in the education sector. She has been a board member of the ifs School of Finance, the efmd (European Foundation for Management Development), and a corporate member of the EQUIS review teams which quality assure business and management schools. She was on the External Advisory Board, Masters' Programmes, Open University Business School, 2002-08. Ann was Vice Chair of A New Direction, 2015-22, and also Vice Chair of Council, Royal Holloway University of London, 2014-24. She is currently a trustee of the Girls Day School Trust and chairs the GDST Academy Trust Board, from 2019. She is a current member of the Remuneration Committee, Corpus Christi College University of Cambridge and a current trustee of AQA. Ann is founding Chair of the Local Governing Body at Ark Soane Academy, Acton.
Ann has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the University of Warwick.
Dr Eve Poole OBE chairs the Woodard Corporation and is a Member of the Woodard Academies Trust. She has a BA from Durham, an MBA from Edinburgh, and a PhD from Cambridge. She has written several books, including Robot Souls and Leadersmithing which are the subject of popular TEDx talks. For 15 years she taught Leadership at Ashridge Business School, after working for the Church Commissioners and for Deloitte Consulting, where she specialised in change management for the Financial Services sector. She was interim CEO of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland in 2023-2024, interim CEO of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2022, Third Church Estates Commissioner for England from 2018-2021, and the first female Chairman of Gordonstoun from 2015-2021.
In 2023 Eve was awarded an OBE for services to education and gender equality.
Charles is a qualified solicitor who has lived and worked in the USA for 14 years. Charles is an experienced chief executive and chair with a career focused on wholesale and retail financial services, media and portfolio management.
Charles has been a trustee and member of the University of Chichester Multi Academy Trust since 2015 and was chair of the Richmond and West Schools Trust until 2021. Charles was also trustee and chairman of Art UK from 2002 until 2023.
Following a first at Oxford and several years with a business selling computers, Adrian spent two years in America at the Harvard Business School in Boston. Returning to the UK, Adrian spent eight years with the Boston Consulting Group. Following that, Adrian was one of three people who founded Apax Partners, a Private Equity business that funds many new or ongoing businesses. Adrian was the Chief Investment Officer until his retirement in 2006. Shortly after that Adrian became the Chairman of Dawn Capital, a new PE business, for seven years until he retired in 2013.
