Dr Deb OuthwaiteChair of the Board of Trustees
Dr Deborah Outhwaite is Chair of BELMAS 2023-2026, and has held roles in secondary, post-16, and system leadership in England. She has over twenty years of experience of teaching and leading in Higher Education and is currently at the Institute of Education at the University of Liverpool and is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE.
An academic, and former education charity CEO, Deb gained her MSc in Social Policy with a dissertation on Education from LSE in 1997 and gained her professional doctorate which explored the leadership challenges of the International Baccalaureate’s Diploma Programme, in 2016. Deb has always held both academic roles in education with leadership roles in practice (sometimes known as a pracademic) as she values the importance of the links between theory and practice.
Alongside working in practice, running a large former Teaching School that ran contracts for STEM Learning and trained teachers with the University of Derby and the University of Nottingham, Deb has worked at Liverpool since 2017, supervising professional doctorates with senior education leaders from around the globe. Including from Japan; Hong Kong; China; Canada and the UAE, she now has 20 completions, and has examined more than 30 theses, largely across areas of educational leadership and professional practice.
Deb has co-convened the Leadership Preparation and Development Research Interest Group since 2015, and has published a range of papers, book chapters, and textbooks largely in this part of the ELMA field. She is a Member of a School Trust in Hertfordshire https://www.hockerill.com/ that delivers the International Baccalaureate’s Diploma Programme. She is a Fellow of https://chartered.college/, Fellow of https://www.thersa.org/, sits on the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Education, and is a Regional Lead for the campaigning group https://womened.com/.
