Describe yourself in three words or phrases.
Mother of a curious girl, lucky to share home and work with my best friend, addicted to education from both sides of the desk.
What do you like most about your job?
It is a job of constant new beginnings and, at the same time, very long relationships. Every new student brings new stories and new dreams, so the excitement keeps renewing itself. Yet we stay with our students for many years, and some of those journeys began a decade ago and continue today. Being there for the first school days, the first university offers, the exam results, and now the first career steps: it never becomes routine.
Describe a project or initiative you’re currently working on that excites you.
Echos Mentoring. It is a system designed around a student’s full range of needs, both current and future, going well beyond tutoring or pastoral check-ins. It first took shape over 10 years of listening to what students actually need, and it has since evolved with the input of our advisory network of education professors and active academics. What moves me most is that some of our former students have now come back as mentors themselves. Watching my own graduates supporting our new students makes Echos feel less like a consultancy and more like a family, and that, to me, is the real measure of the work.
What’s a piece of work you’re proud of, and what did it teach you?
My doctoral thesis on women’s poverty, for which I spent long hours interviewing disadvantaged families about their children’s education journeys. It showed me the other side of the coin in the very geographies we recruit students from: poverty, education and social mobility. It taught me how transformative education can be, and how much work for disadvantaged groups matters. That is why we take on pro bono advisory cases every year, and why some of the graduates we are proudest of are students on full scholarships.
What’s a small daily habit that helps you in your work?
Fifteen minutes of quiet reflection and gratitude. We work with the most precious thing in any family’s life, their children, and alongside all the joy that brings, stress and fatigue are part of the job. That daily pause keeps my stress in balance and protects my optimism.
What’s one change you’d like to see in your sector over the next few years?
Long-term consultancy, informed by data and current developments, moving to the centre of education advising. Career paths are shifting faster than at any point in recent memory, and a decision made at 15 now carries far more uncertainty than it did a generation ago. That calls for consultancy, which is itself adaptable and flexible, able to move with changing dynamics rather than repeat a fixed formula.
What idea, book, podcast or conversation has stayed with you recently?
Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Bauman argues that social institutions no longer hold their shape long enough to anchor long-term life plans, and that individuals must therefore learn to act, plan and weigh their choices under conditions of endemic uncertainty. That is a remarkably accurate description of what our we are walking into.
The qualities Bauman identifies as essential, flexibility, adaptability, the readiness to change course at short notice, are precisely what we now need to cultivate in young people alongside their academic preparation. It sits behind much of my recent reading, and behind a paper I am writing on graduate employment, remote work and AI. Bauman described this uncertainty long before, and he described it precisely.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone starting out in this field?
Keep your excitement and your curiosity alive. The technical side, how applications work, how systems differ, can all be learned. What determines your success is how well you can truly understand the student and the parent sitting in front of you, and how well you understand the world surrounding young people today.
