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
Appointed Chairman in 2019. David has held a number of chair and non-executive director roles, including at LGT Vestra, Campbell-Lutyens & Co, Hoare & Co and Ricardo Plc. David was chair of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme between 2006 and 2012. He was awarded the CBE in 2012 for services to the financial services industry. He was a member of The Boston Consulting Group’s Executive Committee, chaired the global practice areas and led the firm’s people development agenda. David served as a trustee of The Sutton Trust, is a founder member of the Board of the Education Endowment Fund and was chair of the Grants Committee until the end of 2019. He has an MA from Cambridge and an MSc from London Business School.
Becks is the Chief Executive Officer of Lift Schools.
An experienced school leader, Becks was Director of Secondary at Ark Schools from 2017 to 2021. Prior to that, she worked for the Department for Education as Regional Schools Commissioner for south-west England. Becks also worked at Oasis Community Learning for eight years, initially as a Vice Principal and Principal in Bristol, before becoming a Regional Director and then National Education Director. Becks is a council member at the University of Exeter, and a trustee at Ambition Institute and Jamie's Farm.
Ann Mroz was editor of Tes (formerly the Times Educational Supplement) for seven years and editor of Times Higher Education for four years. She is on the advisory board of the Children’s Commissioner for England and the education advisory group of the Sutton Trust, and the European advisory board of Princeton University Press. She is a Trustee of the Reach Foundation, the Institute for Research in Schools and Project Earth. She is also a non-executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance. She received an MBE for services to education in the New Year Honours 2021.
Natalie is the CEO of Education Policy Institute, a research institute she co-founded in 2015. In this role, Natalie has overseen new research spanning education and young people’s mental health issues, including on topics such as the effectiveness of grammar schools, trends in the disadvantage gap, the recruitment and retention of teachers and the quality of the early years workforce. Natalie previously served as a policy adviser to the Department for Education and within the Cabinet Office. At the DfE, she headed up the School Funding Reform Unit, responsible for developing policy to ensure fair allocation of education funding that also represented value for money. Natalie is on the Board of an education charity, the Fair Education Alliance, and also serves as a trustee of another MAT in South East London. From January 2025, Natalie will take up a trustee role with Ambition Institute.
John is a senior Finance Executive with 30 years of extensive international energy sector experience and member of a global business leadership. His responsibilities included leading a global Finance organisation and he has experience of living and working in Europe, S.E. Asia, Far East and the Middle East. He has held executive and non-executive CFO/Finance Director positions, including on JV Boards, in UK and overseas and has been the chair of a Pension Fund Trust and of Audit Committees. He has broad experience in developing and implementing business strategy, leading business organisations through substantial restructuring and transformation in diverse cultures. He has led significant M&A and financial (re)structuring projects and has driven step change improvements in business performance. Since retiring he has been the Treasurer on the Board of a Social Enterprise and a volunteer mentor to start-up entrepreneurs and charity CEOs.
Jane, Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath was ennobled in March 2024 and sits on the Labour benches. She has been a trustee of Lift Schools since April 2020 and was for eight years the Chair of Young Epilepsy, a national children’s charity. She was previously Senior Advisor on Standards and Ethics to the Labour Party, leading their response to the EHRC report into anti semitism. Prior to that she was an independent member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life which advises the Prime Minister on ethical issues relating to standards in public life. She was the independent Chair of the Children and Young People’s Steering Group for Transforming Care, NHS England and Chair of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS, having joined from the Board of University College London Hospitals Foundation Trust. Jane has also previously served on the Council of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, the Department of Health Audit and Risk Committee, chaired a local Housing Association and has been Head of Law for two London boroughs.
Karen has a career spanning more than 30 years in child protection and safeguarding. As a registered social worker she has worked with passion, energy and vision in a variety of settings and sectors. Karen has held a number of senior leadership and management positions in both the statutory and third sectors. As Local Services Director at the NSPCC she is responsible for the delivery of evidence based services to babies, children and families across the UK. Karen has taken a lead role in the development of the UK’s most far-reaching school-based abuse awareness programme. The ‘Speak out. Stay safe.’ programme has been delivered into over 90% of UK primary schools to date and reaches 1.3 million children each year. Karen has a lead role in the development and delivery of the equality, diversity and inclusion strategy at the NSPCC and leads on work with underserved groups through local behaviour change campaigning. Karen is also a trustee at SAYiT, a South Yorkshire LGBTQ+ charity that works with children, young people, parents and professionals.
Andrew has supplied products and services to the education industry for over 35 years, and in that time has delivered instructional content, assessments, data analysis services, professional development, and back office services to schools and MATs, all intended to improve the life chances of young people through supporting school improvement. He has worked for a variety of market-leading commercial organisations, including Pearson, Granada Learning, GL Assessment and Prospects Services. Andrew also has a number of non-executive positions: he is Chair of Big Education Trust, a MAT based in London which as well as delivering teaching and learning also codifies and commercialises innovative best practice, and on the board of the Confederation of School Trusts Professional Development Ltd, the revenue-raising arm of the CST, the sector body representing MATs and Free Schools in England.
Pippa has spent 40 years focussing on large scale transformations and turnarounds across a wide range of industries and with a particular focus on retail and consumer goods businesses. She was a founding partner of AlixPartners in Europe in 2003 and remains a senior advisor. Pippa has led significant transformations and turnarounds including Courtaulds Textiles plc as chief financial officer, MFI plc as chief restructuring officer, Co-op Group as deputy CEO and most recently a executive director of John Lewis, part of the John Lewis Partnership. Pippa is also currently a non-executive director of the Metropolitan Police, London where she is chair of the audit, risk and assurance committee. Pippa is a trustee for The HALO Trust, sitting on their audit and finance committee. The HALO Trust’s key focus is helping communities recover after conflict, with the clearance of landmines, as well as dealing with unexploded ordnance, at the heart of the trust’s community work.
After leaving university, Nigel spent 7 years in industry and then returned to academia. As a mathematician he taught and researched in engineering, with close links into the aerospace industry, specifically aerodynamics and electromagnetics. He contributed over 300 research journal and conference papers and was editor of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids for 14 years. He then took on senior management and leadership roles in the universities of Swansea and Birmingham, including director of the National Higher Education STEM project. He was subsequently Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University from 2011 to 2018 where he promoted the concept of a modern civic university. He has held honorary positions at universities around the world, including the United States National Science Foundation Engineering Research Centre in Mississippi and as scientist-in-residence to the Singapore Government Science, Technology and Research Agency, A*STAR.
Dr Indra Joshi has a unique portfolio with experience stretching across data/AI strategy and implementation. A world-leading expert in digital health and AI technologies, she worked across the global health and AI portfolio of Palantir Technologies to enable better use of data to impact health and care. In 2020 she created the NHS AI Lab, a £250m investment leading to the development and deployment of over 100 AI technologies into UK health and care, whilst determining the right ethical guidance and regulations to protect patients. She is a founding member of One HealthTech – a network which campaigns for the need and importance of better inclusion of all backgrounds, skillsets and disciplines in health technology. Alongside she is an associate editor for BMJ Leader, a trustee for the Wellbeing of Women, a former member of the WHO digital health expert group, and most importantly a mum to two children.
Nicola Lambros has over 20 years of experience in education, 15 of those in senior leadership. Now General Manager for Cognita Schools Europe, Nicola is accountable for the educational and commercial performance of a group of schools in the UK. Nicola has also led on the development and implementation of educational strategies for Cognita Schools across Europe as the European Director of Education. She has successfully led schools as a Headteacher and senior leader in the UK and British International schools in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America; these roles provided the opportunity to establish a senior school, lead the development of a new whole school campus and lead schools successfully through inspections and accreditations. Nicola is a passionate advocate of research in education for school improvement and development. Her area of interest is Mind Brain and Education (MBE) science with particular interest in how this can be effectively applied to cultivate outstanding school cultures to nurture positive wellbeing and mental health leading to excellent student outcomes. Nicola’s own research in this area has provided her with opportunities to present at conferences around the world and write for educational publications. She is also the author of the ‘Pupil Attitudes to Self and School Interventions’ for GL Education to support the effective use of the Pupils Attitude to Self and School (PASS) assessment in schools. Nicola has an MA in Educational Leadership and has been awarded Fellowship of the Chartered College of Teaching.
