Who+is+Ralph+Tabberer?

I am an educator and a parent. I worked for more than 30 years in the English education system - in schools, in research, in government and in teacher education.

In 2000, I found my way into a national role in initial teacher education and teacher recruitment. We had problems, mostly because we could not attract enough people into the teaching profession. I recall we recruited something like 28000 a year when we needed about 35000, with demand rising.

By learning from the way other large organisations - in business and in the armed forces for example - went about recruitment, we turned the situation around. The help we got from innovative schools, willing to throw themselves into training career changers as well as new graduates 'on the job', was fabulous. And teacher educators applied themselves with energy, commitment and great skill too. By 2004, we were recruiting and training 40000 new entrants a year and our independent inspection body, Ofsted, published a report saying that we were bringing into the profession "the best teachers ever". It is worth noting that we made these advances while economies were booming and graduate recruitment was particularly fierce.

I learned from the experience that it was often best to approach the challenges faced by schools by looking outside the profession as much as within. Between 2004 and 2006, my organisation moved the focus to help change the shape of the labour force in schools, bringing in and bringing on hundreds of thousands of support staff - a para-professional tier that could support teaching and learning.

In 2006, my good fortune took me into a wonderful position running the English school system - that is, more than 22000 schools. Once again, I found we could take lessons from business and research, and I found talented colleagues to take work forward using world class performance data systems which exposed, for example, just how many children were making little or no progress in their middle years of schooling. And I worked with business leaders and principals in disadvantaged areas as they combined on new 'academies' to transform life chances for local children.

We did not win every battle but we made a difference in many communities that had experienced failure after failure, year on year. The work goes on.

I am now Chief of Schools in a different part of the world. Through North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, my company GEMS operates schools which are transforming life chances for a different set of communities. We run mind-blowing international schools with fantastic facilities, costing parents tens of thousands of dollars a year. And we run affordable schools that, incredibly, cost less than 1500 dollars a year but achieve results way ahead of the averages for the national education systems they reflect.

And this has brought me to understand, even more clearly, how home and school must combine.