Leadership Foundation

Tom Irvine joined the Leadership Foundation for higher Education as director of consultancy to take forward our important work, supporting senior team development, coaching for vice-chancellors/principals and other senior leaders in the sector, and leadership development consultancy support to individual HEIs.

Tom is one of the country’s most experienced facilitators of leadership development. He has held senior level leadership development positions in both the private and public sectors, giving him a unique perspective into the development of the country’s most senior leaders.

Tom has held senior positions in two other public sector leadership development organisations; as director of leadership at the Leadership Centre for Local Government and as a director at the National College for School Learning.

Tom’s leadership and management development experience really began to take shape in the early 1990s when he spent four years working at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Education Foundation in London. In this role he developed and delivered major programmes of leadership and management development for senior education leaders based on the approaches of major companies such as Rank Xerox, Marks & Spencer and Digital Equipment Company.

Tom then took up the post of group training and development manager for NatWest Bank. In this national role in a major blue chip company with 90,000 employees he was responsible for developing the company’s major programmes of leadership and management development.

Tom originally trained as a teacher of mathematics, taking up his first teaching post in 1979 in possilpark, an inner city area of Glasgow. Tom left the classroom in 1987 when he was head of mathematics in an outer London secondary school. He then served for four years as assistant county education officer in Suffolk local education authority (LEA) with responsibility for the teacher in-service training scheme for Suffolk’s 6,000 teachers and lecturers, before moving to his role at the CBI. His leadership development work began in 1997 whilst working for Suffolk LEA, facilitating leadership programmes for head teachers and college principals.