Meet the team
Below you will find pen portraits of the AlphaPlus Directors.
Peter Burke is Chairman of AlphaPlus. He is also a Special Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham. Prior to setting up AlphaPlus in the 1990s he worked in public examinations and was Chief Executive to the Southern Examining Group, responsible for managing the introduction of the new GCSE examining system.
In Australia, he was seconded to work with examining authorities in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. He thus has extensive knowledge of the procedures and systems associated with a national testing system, and of managing change within a complex organisation.
In his consultancy work he has acted as a policy adviser to the DfES, the Skills for Life Strategy Unit, the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Authority (QCDA) and their equivalent regulatory bodies in Wales and Northern Ireland (ACCAC and CCEA). Overseas, he has worked for governments and higher education institutions in China, Pakistan, Hungary, USA, and for private companies in the oil and gas sectors in Russia and Kuwait.
Gavin is a professional engineer with a successful track with both start up and blue chip companies in the UK and the USA. Gavin worked as an independent e-assessment consultant for a number of years until joining AlphaPlus as a Director in 2006
He brings to the team strong project management skills developed on contracts for both public and private sector customers, and experience gained as process manager in extracting business value from major IT investments through process redesign, system integration, innovation and training.
Since concentrating on the role of ICT in learning and assessment, Gavin has worked on projects for a wide range of public and private organisations, including the TDA, QCDA, Welsh Assembly Government (DCELLS), LTScotland, BECTA, JISC, and a range of Awarding Organisations including City & Guilds, NCFE and EAL, on topics ranging from development guidelines to ensure accessibility of e-assessment, through the impact on regulation of qualifications arising from the use of e-assessment, to the use of e-portfolios to demonstrate wider achievements of young people. The common thread has been establishing effective partnerships between education professionals and the technical community to achieve innovation in teaching and assessment methods and tools. Current activities include responsibility for the authoring of the TDA Qualified Teacher Status Skills Tests in English, Mathematics and ICT, as well as the production and review of Functional Skills Assessments for Awarding Organisations for both paper and on-screen delivery.
Since 2000, John Hamer has worked as an educational consultant. He is the Vice-Chairman of the AlphaPlus Consultancy Ltd., a Special Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
In 1984, after more than 20 years’ teaching and senior management experience in primary and secondary schools and sixth form colleges he joined Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools (HMI) as a history, assessment and secondary education specialist. Amongst other appointments he was a staff inspector for 11-19 education and the specialist adviser to Ofsted for history, political education and museums. He undertook secondments to two local education authorities, to the then DfEE as an adviser on curriculum and assessment and to SCAA (now the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority). John left HMI in 1997 to become the first Education Policy Adviser to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).
John brings to AlphaPlus an extensive knowledge and wide experience of educational issues and developments both in the United Kingdom and further afield. He has recently worked with AlphaPlus on a range of Skills for Life, functional skills and assessment projects; and as a Council of Europe expert consultant in Cyprus, Kosovo, Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
Anne Matthews is a research and training consultant with a background in teaching and curriculum evaluation. Following an initial teaching career in both secondary and adult education in the UK and overseas, she spent 15 years working for a department of Oxford University specialising in assessment before becoming an independent consultant.
She has wide experience in assessment and training in both the educational and vocational contexts, and in accreditation and quality assurance of programmes and institutions. She was responsible for the development of her division as an Awarding Body for a number of high level NVQs, including Management and Project Management and led the development of a Validation Service for both educational and commercial organisations seeking external recognition and certification of their programmes.
Her consultancy work has included a wide range Basic and Key Skills projects for the DfES, CDELL and Granada Education as well as the development and assessment of NVQ Management candidates and the training of NVQ assessors. She has also contributed to a number of research and evaluation projects for QCA and CDELL. In addition, she spent eight years as a facilitator for the Comparability Studies developed for UCAS by the University of Oxford, Department of Educational Studies, designed to admit an increasing range of qualifications to the UCAS Tariff, thus extending and strengthening her knowledge and understanding of the structure and assessment strategies of a wide range of academic and vocational qualifications.
From 2004 to 2007 Anne was the project manager for the DfES Skills for Life Embedding Project, working with 20 SSCs and Awarding Bodies to embed Skills for Life in Vocational Qualifications. This was followed by work on an extension to this project which looked at embedding Skills for Life into the first five Diploma lines of learning and two QCA projects concerned with the introduction and implementation of the Diplomas.
In 2008 Anne took on the project management of the Becta funded Open Source Schools project. Together with Miles Berry, the Community Manager, she established a community of educators and technologists who want to share their knowledge, experience and insights of using open source software in education and a website which provides a range of user generated resources for schools to find out about the benefits that open source software can bring to education. Although the Becta funding has now ended, Anne continues to support the community on a pro bono basis as it moves towards a self sustaining model and to fulfill the project team’s vision is for the site to become the hub for the community of users and developers of open source software in UK schools.
Tom has worked in education and educational technology for the last 17 years. Starting as a University Lecturer and research team leader at Brunel University, Tom subsequently ran an e-assessment technology company for 10 years, developing and deploying innovative e-assessment products for customers in the private and public sectors, before joining AlphaPlus as an educational consultant.
Tom marries strong technical skills with a practical understanding of educational and management issues. In 1999 – 2000, he designed and developed a new assessment-for-learning product for the English schools market, developing technology which subsequently won a DTI SMART award. He is the technical architect of two current e-assessment products, one of which won the Scottish e-Assessment Award for Summative Assessment in 2009.
As a consultant, Tom has been retained by some of the UK’s largest companies, including Unilever, National Power, and British Aerospace (Airbus). In recent years he has regularly acted as consultant to SQA, working with key staff and stakeholders to help develop and refine SQA’s strategy for e-assessment. Other consultancy clients include QCDA, City & Guilds, NCFE, BECTA, and JISC. He is also a technical consultant to the SMART Centre at the University of Durham.
Tom was trained as a software engineer, and obtained a PhD in Machine Vision from Brunel University in 1992.
Jenny has a long history of delivering change and innovation within educational teaching and learning. During her secondment to the Quality Improvement Agency (QIA) she was responsible for the design, commissioning and contract management of research projects and innovative programmes focusing on developing leaders and managers in the Further Education system. Jenny is a qualified researcher and since joining AlphaPlus has managed many of our evaluation and research project, including the 2009 statistical interim evaluation report for the Functional Skills Pilot (QCA), national consultations for QCDA and LLUK, and is currently leading the independent evaluation of the impact of changes to A levels and GCSE, and the independent evaluation of the linked pair of GCSEs in mathematics for QCDA/DfE.
Jenny has worked in secondary, further and higher education, and has a sound knowledge and understanding of teaching and learning pedagogy, including e-learning practices. She brings expertise and experience in leading course development and delivery to the team. In addition, she is committed and experienced in developing and supporting practitioner researcher, leading the evaluation of programmes and designing research projects.
Her strengths include facilitating effective and targeted stakeholder engagement and management, utilising many different approaches. This ensures the work she delivers has credibility with practitioners and wider stakeholder groups. She is also a well respected project manager who has delivered a large number of high profile, highly successful educational projects.
John is an experienced leader of projects in education. His work includes:
- Evaluation and Performance Management: He is currently leading quantitative evaluation work for Functional Skills, GCSEs and A levels, and is the nominated educational consultant for the Driving Standards Agency’s Theory Testing Programme
- Assessment: John has managed a wide range of formative and external summative assessments including developing and delivering on-screen tests for Government customers such as TDA, LLUK, QCDA, DFE, BIS and for a number of UK awarding organisations
- Technology: Prior to joining AlphaPlus, John had worked for many years as an e-learning and e-assessment business manager with a track record of business growth in new media learning technologies. He developed innovative systems for education and assessment, working with a range of public and private sector clients through the three companies he has helped to build: BTL Group Ltd, The Virtual College plc, 3Square Solutions Ltd. He managed consulting and development projects in e-learning, e-assessment and e-portfolios. As an example, he recently completed a 30 month assignment as expert consultant to the JISC e-learning programme. His work has involved developing and deploying innovative solutions for e-assessment and e-learning in schools, colleges and workplace learning.
John is a qualified engineer with a BSC and MEng in Electrical Engineering. He is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors and a board member of the e-Assessment Association. He is Chair of Governors at Beckfoot school (a large secondary school in Bingley, West Yorkshire) and a governor of Hazelbeck School, a secondary specialist school located on the same site.
