Personal Philosophy

Personal Mission Statement

I have been very much inspired by Buckminster Fuller, and my personal mission statement reflects his approach of changing the world through designing better alternatives. My purpose is to design and implement metaphysical artefacts that bring greater life to all, and less to none.

My skills are within education, and the metaphysical artefacts I create are systems of deeper learning. They exemplify doing MORE with LESS and enable people to get remarkable results across a variety of domains.

I have trained more than 200,000 people over the last 20 years, helping them to become better thinkers, better teachers, more effective communicators, happier employees, more effective entrepreneurs and even more sensible eaters.

I happen to think it’s very important in a rapidly changing world: the ability to learn new things fast is the currency of the future.

Particular Skills

Having been engaged as a school improvement consultant for nearly 10 years, I’ve trained many teachers and senior leaders. My signal strength is to present solutions that people instantly see as being less work.

I bring a BSC framework to the table. Unless the solution is Better, Simpler and Cheaper than the status quo, people are not going to be interested in it.

I’ve been at the intersection of entrepreneurship and education for my entire career, and I’ve tried to bring entrepreneurial thinking into all my roles, and to teach the mindset of the problem-solver at every juncture.

All people are resistant to change. Teachers more than most. Usually, people attracted to education have very strong ideas about how to do things; they’re usually leaders, bosses, confident enough to tell people what to do. So the biggest challenge is getting people to see, as quickly as possible, how the change will be less work, with better results.

I am also a productivity freak, being fortunate to have one of Microsoft’s most effective project managers in the digital innovation space as my personal mentor. (Everyone should have a mentor!) I teach these productivity systems to teachers so they can see how to simplify their lives and get better work/life balance at the same time as delivering more value in their jobs. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.

Evidence

One great example was when I was Vice-Principal at Paddington Academy in charge of Curriculum and Assessment. We had taken over a failing school in inner-city London in 2005, and within 2 years we were in the Top 10 of most improved schools in the country.

Within 5 years the school had become classified as an outstanding school.

Although I had moved on to a wider-reaching school improvement role by then, my contribution was to establish systems that focused relentlessly on teaching and learning, and to hire a great team: 5 of the 7 senior leaders in the 2011 inspection were recruited by me from 2005-2007. This has stayed with me ever since. Set up the systems, recruit great people and get out of the way.

Profile

I am an internationally published author, entrepreneur and education systems designer. I have over 200,000 student enrolments on online training programmes (130,000 on Udemy alone), and my books on problem-solving are published in 6 languages, including Chinese.

My signal contribution to the education space is frameworks that make it easier to implement the best innovations in education, one thing at a time.

My education mission is to help learning institutions become future-proof, complex adaptive systems.

Accelerated Language Learning

The CASSIDY Method is 50% owner of an accelerated language learning method called SaySomethingIn.com, which appears to be hugely effective in learning new languages quickly. We’ve managed to get students operationally fluent from scratch in 5 days, and even having 30-minute “zero-English” conversations with native speakers in a single day. Programmes in Welsh, Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese have already been constructed, and we are working hard on finishing both Chinese for English speakers and English for Mandarin speakers, which we expect to be hugely popular in China.

I am 50% owner of SmartWisdom, a non-linear knowledge-management technique that has been shown to be 20% more effective than traditional methods by teams of neuroscientists in two independent research studies. Until recently it had only been used in business and university settings, with Chinese students in particular finding it helpful. However, the programme has now been adapted for school-age learners, particularly those looking to study in an English-medium university. A pilot programme was launched in September 2020 in Qingdao Number 2 Middle School, which is the highest-ranked public school in Shandong province.

I am also a shareholder in a neuro-education company that has been using fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) to develop learners’ concentration and focus for the last 20 years. The ephemeralization of technology has now made high-quality, personalised brain-training affordable for most learners by wearing a simple headset — a “Fitbit” for the brain. This is a developmental, capacity-building technology that swims against the tide of the TikTok culture, which promotes the dumbing down of content into increasingly granular knowledge nuggets.

I am co-founder of SmartLearning®, the umbrella brand for all these ventures. The SmartLearning® philosophy is to produce next-generation learning effectiveness by researching and promoting a future-facing combination of great teaching, effective techniques and human-capacity-augmenting technology:

Teaching × Techniques × Technology

What Brought Me Here

I am looking for a school group, either in the UK or abroad, with which to bring to fruition many of the education innovations I have been working on for the last 20 years.

In my first exposure to international education at Yew Chung International School in Hong Kong, I was fortunate enough to meet a group of creative innovators who really opened my eyes to what high-school education could be. Together we founded a Business School in Hong Kong to teach the principles of entrepreneurship to school-age students, alongside academic excellence. We created the time in the curriculum to do this by utilising accelerated learning techniques that enabled students to learn twice as much in half the time.

Returning to the UK, first at Paddington Academy and subsequently as a consultant, I found a tremendous resistance to such innovation and creativity. An individual who went on to become the executive head of a commercially successful south London group of academies told me calmly, as I was interviewing for a Headship of an Academy in Peckham:

Tom, of course I want to innovate, but I don’t want to do anything that might jeopardise exam results.

This is pretty much like Steve Jobs saying:

Of course I want to create a smartphone, but I don’t want to do anything that might jeopardise sales of our desktop computers…

Luckily I was finally presented with the opportunity to start my own school in Cambridge, and the methodologies were so successful that we were invited to establish a group of schools using the same method in China.

Ideally I’m hoping to find an organisation that appreciates that a very different future is coming faster than any of us could have imagined, and that the current school offer, even in the best education establishments, is just not fit for purpose.

In a general sense, I believe that I have a tremendous amount to offer in terms of learning frameworks, entrepreneurial thinking and inspirational leadership. But it is in the particular that we can see evidence. Here are some specific examples of my leadership within pedagogy:

• I was early in the online learning space, creating the first workbook and live companion website for ESL learning in Hong Kong in 1999. This business went very well, but I left Hong Kong for family reasons at the end of 2004, and without my presence it closed in 2008. This was an early lesson in the importance of systems over personalities.
• I first got into the topic of Within School Variation in 2005, in the early days of Paddington Academy, and I became a regular on the SSAT circuit from 2008 onwards. I was part of the 4Matrix team and a key part of bringing the Progress 8 measure into popularity, through discussions with the DfE on the inappropriateness of the 5 A*-C metric as a measure of an institution’s academic quality.
• I was early in the online learning platform business, establishing a significant following on Udemy as far back as 2012. I now have over 130,000 students in the esoteric areas of personal development, career development and teacher training, and more straightforward topics like GCSE Mathematics. I have gone on to be represented on over 20 similar platforms.
• I created one of the first implementations of the EaaS model — Education as a Service — in 2016 when I founded Cambridge Leadership College, a spin-off from Cambridge International School in Cambridge, UK.
• While at Cambridge Leadership College, I established a partnership with ZNotes Education, who at the time were an up-and-coming provider of revision notes, “by students for students”. This resulted in ZClass, whereby we live-streamed all our classes over YouTube so that ZNotes’ entire network of international students could benefit from our teaching faculty, comprising mostly postgraduate students from Cambridge University. This supports the bigger initiative of making the highest-quality education provision available, accessible, and affordable to all.
• Because of this work, I was invited with one of my top students to represent SDG#4 at the 2017 Leadership conference on the SDGs at the UN in Geneva.
• In 2016, inspired by the Agile movement in software development, and in particular by the idea of working in periods of high intensity called “sprints”, I created the Learning Sprint, to see to what extent the same ideas could port to education. It has become the cornerstone of my education methodology and has proved its worth in all areas of learning, from Portuguese to Psychology. Students can learn a year’s worth of work in 5 intense days, performing well enough to take an AS or A2 paper at the end of a single sprint. Of course, the average student may need more than a single sprint to get an A*, but the efficiency of the method is encouraging.
• I have significant experience of training Principals and school leaders in Africa. Since 2016 I have been delivering in-person and remote leadership training as pro bono work. My most recent training was the Ogun State, Nigeria Education Leadership Summit in September 2020.

It is my bold proposition that the world is changing so rapidly that the ability to learn new things fast is the currency of the future.

My approach is really that of the entrepreneur: we build the plane as we learn to fly it. Luckily I’ve already built the first version of the plane and we have a lot of evidence of how well it works — but we can always improve.

My overarching mission is to help create a world that works for everybody, and education has a big part to play in that.