LEnet people are leading practitioners, researchers, policy makers and business people. Browse the People menu to see the diverse international and cross-disciplinary backgrounds we bring.
LEnet Leads
Ruth Deakin Crick is a Reader in Systems Learning and Leadership at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol. Formerly a music teacher, then a headteacher, she moved into academia after completing her postgraduate training in educational 
leadership and administration, applied theology and educational policy sociology. She was one of the originators of the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory, a self assessment tool which provides a framework for a coaching conversation about learning, along with Guy Claxton and Patricia Broadfoot. Her research interests includelearning power, enquiry based learning, identity and story in learning, organisational learning and change and the interface between research, policy, practice and enterprise. She is a founding member ViTaL Partnerships and lead researcher on the Paul Hamlyn funded Learning Futures project with the Innovation Unit. She is the Research Director of the Learning Warehouse, an online repository for research led assessment tools, providing feedback for individuals and organisations and data for ongoing research. Ruth is Programme Director for the new MSc in Systems Learning and Leadership which is offered full time and part time from October 2011 at the Graduate School of Education in Bristol.
Simon Buckingham Shum is a Senior Lecturer at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, where he is also Associate Director (Technology), and leads the Hypermedia Discourse Group. 
He brings a human-centered computing perspective to the challenge of building collective intelligence, and the sensemaking capacity that 21st-century scholarship and citizenship require. Following a B.Sc. Psychology, M.Sc. Ergonomics and Ph.D. Human-Computer Interaction, he has worked on learning technology and e-science, with a particular interest in visual hypertext for mapping meetings and argumentation. He co-edited “Visualizing Argumentation” (2003), which brought together leading figures in argument mapping, and “Knowledge Cartography” (2008) expands this. He has received funding for sensemaking projects from diverse sources including AHRC, EPSRC, ESRC, JISC, British Council, BP, DARPA, NASA, and the Hewlett Foundation. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Learning Futures Project is currently funding the EnquiryBlogger project with Univ. Bristol. He served as Director of the OU’s SocialLearn Project in 2009, on the Steering Group of the OU’s OpenLearn OER initiative (2006–08), and is currently an investigator on the Open Learning Network Project to build collective intelligence for the OER movement. He is also Chair of Governors at Bushfield School in Milton Keynes.
Chris Goldspink
is a Director and the Chief Scientific Officer with Sydney based consulting company Incept Labs. He has seventeen years experience as a consultant to industry and government in the areas of management improvement, organizational change, and public management reform. Formerly he held senior line and staff management positions with the Australian Bureau of Statistics having been responsible for organizational development, marketing and information services and statistical analysis and output. His career has included periods in the academy, including the International Graduate School of Management, University of South Australia and the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, University of Surrey. He has taught and supervised students in Australia, New Zealand and Europe and throughout South East Asia. Chris maintains an active teaching role in business strategy, leadership, international marketing and organizational change as well as in systems concepts and research methods.
Chris’ research interests concern the applicability of complex systems concepts to understanding social and organizational change. He also has a strong education related research focus. This includes the design and conduct of trans-disciplinary research into trajectories of school change, quality of pedagogy, student engagement and wellbeing and learning outcomes for the South Australian Department of Education and Children’s Services. In collaboration with Dr Robert Kay, he has developed a method for surfacing individuals and groups deeply held assumptions and worldviews. These have recently been used in the corporate sector to understand risk managers approach to uncertainty and, in collaboration with Sydney University and KPMG, are currently being used to understand what CEOs mean when they advocate innovation.
His published output is diverse, spanning theoretical contributions to understanding processes of social and cognitive emergence and social simulation ontology, through empirical research into governance mechanisms in web 2.0 and on to practitioner pieces on management and leadership, including in education.
Systems Learning and Leadership Group
Who we are
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Ruth Deakin Crick |
Ruth |
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Howard Green |
Howard studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and went on to a career in teaching, including two secondary headships, in Oxfordshire and Plymouth. He then worked at the Training & Development Agency, setting up the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers, the largest senior management training programme in Europe; the Department for Education, as a special adviser on leadership, and the National College for School Leadership, where he developed two national programmes for senior leadership teams and coordinated several projects on leading schools of a religious character. More recently, Howard has been Director of Education, and now Director of Research & Development, for the Oasis Academies. He has written and published widely on educational issues, particularly school leadership & management. |
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Patrick Godfrey
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Patrick is Professor of Systems Engineering at the University of Bristol, and Director of the Systems Centre and the EPSRC Industrial Doctorate Centre in Systems at University of Bristol and University of Bath. Patrick has for most of his career been a Director of a large consulting engineering company – Halcrow, where he specialised in the design of offshore oil and gas structures and more recently developed an innovation leadership position pioneered new ways of thinking about and managing the complete life cycle of large construction projects by developing the interface between business and engineering and using a ‘soft systems’ approach which integrates people with our physical environment. It was during this time, 1995-2005, that he was appointed Visiting Professor of Civil Engineering Systems at University of Bristol. He co-authored ‘Doing it Differently – Systems for Rethinking Construction’ which was awarded a Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB), Gold Medal and Author of the Year in 2001 From 1996 to 2001 he personally provided strategic risk management consultancy services to BAA for the development of Terminal 5. He retired from Halcrow to take up his Chair in Systems Engineering in 2005. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Fellow of Institution of Civil Engineers, Fellow of City and Guilds Institute, Fellow of the Energy Institute, Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Engineering by the University of Bristol in 2004. He is also a National Advocate for Industrial Doctorate Centres for EPSRC. |
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Martin Sandbrook
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Martin has explored many areas in his professional work: he has been an accountant, a senior manager in the both public and private sectors, a process consultant and a lecturer, in Business and Management at Bath Spa University. In 2007, he took time out from his working life to study the Responsibility and Business Practice MSc at University of Bath, an experience that changed his life and professional direction. He now combines his passion and commitment to the ideas of sustainability and systems thinking with his experience in management, supporting individuals and organisations make the shift to a more systemic approach to action and change. |
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Qing Wang
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I am an MPhil/PhD student in Positive Psychology and Learning at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol. My research interests include learning power, authentic enquiry, mindfulness, and learner’s experience and identity. After completing a MEd in Educational Psychology, I focus my research area on coaching psychology and development of positive learning dispositions. My doctoral research explores the nature of Coaching for Learning and its role in facilitating enquiry-based learning and the development of learning power. |
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Sue Woodhead
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Sue’s background is largely in the hospitality industry and public sector administration (local government and higher education). She has worked closely with Ruth Deakin Crick for nine years, supporting a number of projects – predominantly the ELLI Research Programme. Currently working for Vital Partnerships and Learning Warehouse, as business and administration manager, Sue continues to support the further development of the ELLI Programme. Her role includes the day to day running of the two organisations, overseeing the financial processes, monitoring the projects and being a central point of contact within the network. She also has a key role in the Learning Warehouse support team, liaising with project leaders/managers and users of ELLI to offer support help and advice in use of the online tool. In addition Sue is currently on secondment, one day a week, to the University of Bristol – adding administrative capacity to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation ‘Learning Futures Project’ and in the development of the new Systems Learning and Leadership Research Centre, and Masters Programme. |
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Dr Ruth Deakin Crick Reader in Systems Learning and Leadership Graduate School of Education
Dr Mike Yearworth Reader in Systems, Systems Centre.
Dr Helen Jelfs, Research Fellow, Graduate School of Education.
Martin Sandbrook, consultant to the MSc development programme, Graduate School of Education, visiting fellow in the Systems Centre.
Professor John Davis, Systems Centre.
Professor Leroy White, Department of Management.
Professor Patrick Godfrey, Director of the Systems Centre
Dr Emma Langman - visiting fellow, Systems Centre
Howard Green, visiting fellow, Graduate School of Education.
Dr Kai Ren, Shaanxi Normal University
Qing Wang, PhD student Graduate School of Education.
Shaofu Huang, PhD student Graduate School of Education.
Helen Tracy, PhD student, Graduate School of Education.
Mim Hutchins, EdD student, Graduate School of Education.
Tim Small, Head of R&D ViTaL Partnerships
Dr Geoff Cox, RSVP Design
Dr Barbara McCombs, University of Denver
Dr Chris Goldspink, Incept Labs, University of Sydney
Professor Helen Haste, University of Harvard
Tim Coburn, Flourish Ltd.
