Relationships Foundation Annual Conference, Cambridge, 13 September 2019 – Driving change through relationships

James Kerr is a superb presenter and a natural storyteller who speaks on a mixture of topics including sports psychology, leadership practice and organisational science, with a compelling narrative.

Kerr is the author behind the global best-seller Legacy, revealing the simple secrets of success behind some of the world's elite business, sports and military organisations. In Legacy, Kerr unpicks the secrets of the world's most successful sporting team, the All Blacks. The book has been described as 'seminal' by the Independent newspaper and 'unputdownable' by Bloomberg. The Daily Telegraph newspaper called it the ‘modern version of Vince Lombardi’s guides to coaching' and says 'for those searching for genuine keys to team culture, it is manna from heaven.

Through his background in psychology, Kerr explores the driving forces behind best teams to extraordinary results including a focus on excellence, a collective commitment, a high degree of autonomy, trust and individual initiative, compelling communication, individual accountability, integrity and humility, all underpinned by a climate in which 'leaders create leaders'. There is an impressive list of teams and corporations that have sought Kerr’s expertise including, US and UK Special Forces, Formula 1 teams, America’s Cup crews, Premier League football managers, Olympic Performance Directors, Google, PayPal, Dyson, Red Bull, Shell and Boeing.

As well as small, elite teams, Kerr addresses the specific challenges faced by larger, more diverse organisations today: including the impact that female leaders can have in previously male dominated environments, the challenges of engaging millennials, the shift from a transactional towards a transformative leadership style, personal leadership, ethics and integrity, marginal gains and incremental improvement, values and vision-setting, and resilience in adversity.

Professor Colleen McLaughlin is the Director of Education Innovation at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education. She has been a Head of Dept at the University of Sussex and Dep Head of Faculty at the Faculty of Education University of Cambridge. She is a trained counsellor and established a training programme at Cambridge. She has worked on researching and developing thinking and practice in the area of young people and psychosocial wellbeing, as well as vulnerability, for forty years now. Key research projects include ‘Changing Adolescence’ for the Nuffield Foundation. She now leads the Education and Reform team who specialise in systemic, research informed reform working with Governments, NGOs and others.
Recent projects include the transformation of the entire school education system in Kazakhstan. She is currently an advisor on the ESRC Impact E Nurture Network focusing on the developing of research informed practice in schools in the areas of schooling and mental health in the digital world.

Key publications include:

Banerjee, R., McLaughlin, C., Cotney, J., Roberts, L. and Peereboom (2015) Promoting Emotional Health, Well-being, and Resilience in Primary Schools. Cardiff: Public Policy Institute for Wales.

Gray, J., Galton, M., McLaughlin, C., Clark, B. and Symonds, J. (2011) The Supportive School: Wellbeing and the Young Adolescent. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 139 pp.

McLaughlin, C. (2010) ‘Relational Matters: a review of the impact of school experience on mental health in early adolescence,’ Educational and Child Psychology. 27(1), pp. 95-107

Gordon holds the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Chair in Psychology and is the inaugural Director of the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Centre for Adoption Research and Practice.
He received his PhD from Cardiff University in 1998, was appointed Lecturer in Psychology the same year and Professor of Psychology in 2008. He has held appointments as the Alexander McMillan Chair and Professor of Psychology at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and Professor of Quantitative Behaviour Genetics at the University of Leicester.

His primary research interests focus on examining the impact of family relationship dynamics (e.g. inter-parental conflict, parenting, parent mental health) on child and adolescent development and psychopathology (e.g. depression, anxiety, conduct problems, academic attainment), with a primary focus on adoption, foster-care and families in transition (e.g. parental separation). He employs novel real-world research designs to examine the interplay between genetic factors, pre-natal, post-natal rearing experiences and outcomes for children, utilising an intergenerational research to practice framework.

He is a member of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), a member of the Evidence Panel of the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF), a Member of the Department for Work and Pension’s (DWP) Methods Advisory Group (MAG), and a member of the Together for Children and Young People in Wales (T4CYP) Resilience and Early Intervention Workstream. He is a consultant and advisor to several government departments in the UK and internationally.

CEO Engine B - Powering a new open age of Professional Services

Shamus has over 23 years’ experience in Back Office transformation cross-industry and a broad in-field knowledge of undertaking Operational Strategy work for various global clients, from Investment Banks through to major Leisure companies.
In 1993 he disrupted the BPO industry by building the first multi-function, multi-client BPO business. Shamus later joined PWC Consulting as a Financial Services Partner before that was acquired by IBM. He then went on to build IBM's first BPO operation in India and followed that by building dozens of Shared Service Centres around the world and in 2004/5 was managing a series of centres with 17,000 staff in Asia, Europe and the Americas, delivering Banking Operations, Insurance Claims, Finance, HR, Procurement and Call Centre services to clients globally. With the emergence of advanced automation
Shamus is now leading the Automation Proposition covering everything from advanced robotics all the way through to Cognitive Computing. And all this in addition to his 120 km a week cycling addiction.

Areas of expertise:
Advisory, Financial Services, Management Consulting

(Taken from http://bit.ly/2MtC35O)

Professor Robin Banerjee is Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex.
He is a developmental psychologist who has directed the university’s CRESS (Children’s Relationships, Emotions, and Social Skills) research lab over many years, leading investigations of children's social and emotional functioning, and working closely with practitioners and policymakers in the areas of education and mental health.
Recent studies from the CRESS lab have examined the factors involved in peer acceptance and rejection, the social and cognitive processes involved in childhood social anxiety, and the connections between consumer culture, peer relationships, and well-being in school children. A core applied focus of the CRESS lab is the development and evaluation of school-based strategies to support pupils' social and emotional functioning.

Michael Fielding is an Emeritus Professor of Education at University College London Institute of Education.

Widely published in the fields of student voice, educational leadership and radical democratic education, for 15 years Michael taught in UK secondary schools, including two pioneer comprehensives, one in Crawley, West Sussex and the other in Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. After a brief spell as a LEA Senior Adviser in Bedfordshire he worked for the next 20 years at Cambridge, Sussex and London Universities.

Strongly committed to a deeply relational view of education, of democracy, and of human being and becoming, three influences conjointly continue to shape the manner and direction of his work. The first draws on his experience of deputy headship at Stantonbury Campus, Milton Keynes (at the time one of the largest and most radical comprehensive schools in the country). The second concerns the life and work of John Macmurray, one of the greatest Scottish philosophers of the 20th century. The third influence is animated by his ongoing research on the London headteacher, Alex Bloom, who, in the first decade after WW2 in the one of the most deprived areas of our capital city ran what was arguably the most radical democratic secondary state school England has ever seen.

Michael’s most recent book, Learning to be Human: the educational legacy of John Macmurray (Routledge 2015), seeks to reaffirm the centrality of persons in contemporary education. Betrayed and bullied by the language and ideology of the market and an irresponsibly narrow notion of schooling, we too readily forget the deeper human purposes of education on which the well-being and future prospects of society depends.