Dame Allan's Schools Lecture Series

Matthew Syed is an author and highly acclaimed speaker in the field of high performance. He has written seven best-selling books on the subject of mindset and high performance – Bounce, Black Box Thinking, Rebel Ideas, The Greatest, and his celebrated children’s books, What Do You Think?, You Are Awesome and Dare To Be You – and has worked with many leading organisations to build a mindset of continuous improvement. He is also a multi-award-winning journalist for The Times and The Sunday Times and presenter of the popular BBC Radio 4 programme, Sideways, currently in its sixth series. Matthew is a regular contributor to television and radio and, in his previous career, was the England table tennis number one for almost a decade. Matthew’s work explores a thought-provoking approach to high performance in the context of a complex and fast-changing world.

Dr Lucy Worsley is, by day Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces and by night a writer of history books. Somewhere in between she also finds the time to present TV series on a range of historical subjects. She will give an illustrated tour through the dark story of our fascination with murder. Lucy has covered the history of this very British obsession in a book and BBC TV series. Here she shares its secrets and explores the history of this phenomenon in forensic detail, examining not only the crimes themselves but also how murder became a form of middle-class entertainment through novels, plays, artefacts and the press. From a Regency serial killer to Agatha Christie, this is the story of how crime was turned into art.

Jo Fairley became Britain's youngest-ever magazine editor, at the age of 23, and spent her twenties editing Look Now, then the iconic fashion magazine Honey. She then went on to found the pioneering organic and Fairtrade chocolate company Green & Black's with her husband, Craig Sams, building it into a global ethical brand. She has gone on to create several serial ventures, two in her home town of Hastings – Judges Bakery (a one-stop organic and natural food store) and The Wellington Centre (a nine-room boutique wellbeing centre), as well as two online ventures, perfumesociety.org and beautybible.com. She is author of 25 books including Sweet Dreams: The Story of Green & Black's.

Chairman of family business, Warburtons, Jonathan has overseen the company’s transition into a national brand with the business having achieved growth of over 60% to a turnover in excess of £550m and bakery and distribution sites growing by over 40%. He was also the brains behind the development of Warburtons iconic TV ad campaign, featuring members of the Warburton family. He will discuss how he helped turn Warburton’s into a national brand and Britain’s favourite baker.

An international speaker, bestselling author and co- host of The High Performance Podcast, Professor Damian Hughes combines his practical and academic background with sport, organisational development and change psychology to help organisations, including a wide range of international and national sporting teams, create a high performing culture. He will cover what it is that makes particular ideas and stories stick in our minds. He shows how reframing our understanding from ‘how clever are you?’ to instead asking, ‘how are you clever?’ can have radical effects on the everyday language we use. He will demonstrate how directors convince movie executives to invest large sums of money in a project based on one simple line of information. By showing how we can use strategies like the ‘The Curse of Knowledge’, the ‘Velcro Theory of Memory’ and ‘Curiosity gaps’ we can all adopt simple ideas to make sure that we can lead our teams and colleagues to deliver consistently high performance.

Allanian Ruth Gregory’s research centres on the interface between fundamental high energy physics and cosmology. She is best known for the Gregory–Laflamme instability, describing an instability of black strings in higher dimensions. Having studied Mathematics at Cambridge, she went on to earn her PhD in Particle Cosmology with Stephen Hawking’s relativity group. While in Chicago as a postdoctoral researcher she spent three years at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and two years at the Fermi Institute in the University of Chicago. She returned to Cambridge on a five-year Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council advanced fellowship at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. She then moved to Durham on a Royal Society University Research Fellowship before becoming Head of Physics at King’s College London in 2021. Ruth was awarded the 2006 Maxwell Medal by the Institute of Physics and Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award in 2011.

Sara Davies MBE is the founder and creative director of Crafter’s Companion, a business she established while studying at York University. To date, the business has proudly collected more than 25 awards for the company’s achievements and for Sara’s accomplishments as an entrepreneur, in addition to a multitude of craft industry awards for its innovative craft products. In 2016 Sara was presented with an MBE in the Her Majesty’s Birthday Honours List, for services to the economy. 2019 heralded Sara’s first appearance as a Dragon on BBC2’s Dragons Den. The youngest dragon to ever enter the den she quickly successfully invested a multitude of businesses across various sectors. Her popularity caught the eye of Strictly Come Dancing and she entered as a contestant in 2021. The entrepreneur is passionate about championing women in business, mentoring and the North East of England. In 2021, Sara became an ambassador of the dressing service and coaching charity, Smart Works Newcastle.

Roger Martin-Fagg is an economist who combines insight into the financial and policy worlds with management strategy. As such he delivers both an economic outlook, and what organisations should do to prepare. After studying Economics, Economic History and Geography Martin-Fagg worked as an economist with the New Zealand Government. Martin-Fagg specialises in making economic activity, trends and indicators understandable to non-economists and cuts through the jargon to reveal what the numbers, market shifts and policy announcements really mean. The lecture will cover: The causes of the current inflation rate in particular demographic profiles The concept of monetary equilibrium and the causes of boom and recession Current indicators and what they tell us about the next three years How the media mislead us with their economic

Marcus is a go-getter! He’s a rock climber, mountaineer, caver, adventure fisherman, motor biker, sportscar driver and father of three. He started his career as an English Literature Teacher, having studied with some of the most inspiring Professors of the time at Cambridge University in the 1980s. Pupils achieved amazing results using his teaching and he was asked to become a teacher trainer, to help more teachers and pupils enjoy the same successes. This work became known more widely, amongst businesses, large and small, charities, sports teams – in fact all sorts of people from every walk of life who were looking to achieve higher performance in what they do. Over the last 26 years he’s worked all over the world in 36 countries, with thousands of organizations and hundreds of thousands of people, sharing his ideas with those seeking to achieve growth, success and happiness in their personal and working life.