Tony is Founding Director of Birch Education, a bespoke educational consultancy dedicated to empowering individuals and teams to develop high quality, sustainable approaches. He specialises in partnership, leadership coaching and evaluation in the primary sector. Previously Tony worked for Bolton Council for more than 20 years managing an award-winning educational ICT team, as school improvement adviser and Head of School Improvement prior to becoming Assistant Director and the lead for education and learning strategy. Tony remains fascinated by educational development: while in his role in Bolton he took a secondment to the commercial sector, completed work as an Additional Inspector and was involved in governance of a range of organisations. Recently he was Chief External Examiner for Manchester University’s primary PGCE. Tony has a Ph.D and is an accredited Neurolinguistic Programming ‘practitioner’. He is a Senior Associate of the AOEA and a member of the development team.