Tom Arbuthnott has been leading cross-sector partnerships in Berkshire, Birmingham and London since 2010.Tom’s career started as a teacher of History, Geography and RE in challenging state sector secondary schools. He built wide experience in the inner city and in the suburbs, both in Birmingham and in Surrey, eventually developing a career as an English teacher in schools with a significant emphasis on students with English as an Additional Language.Educated himself in the independent sector as a King’s Scholar at Eton College, Tom was given the chance in 2010 to build a cross-sector partnership programme for King Edward’s School in Birmingham. Over six years, he built a network of over 190 state sector schools, with over 600 teachers per year coming to King Edward’s for training, and with over 16,000 students annually engaging with the programme. The project won ‘Best Independent/State school partnership’ in the 2016 TES awards, and was cited as an important influence in KES winning the ‘West Midlands Independent School of the Decade’ Award for the Sunday Times in 2020.Since 2016, Tom has led the partnerships programme at Eton College. He leads on Eton’s ‘gold-standard’ partnership with two outstanding free schools, Holyport College and the London Academy of Excellence, as well as being the prime mover behind the establishment in 2019 of the Thames Valley Learning Partnership, which brings together six non-selective state schools with two independent schools for mutual benefit. He also oversees Eton’s widening access programme, and was responsible for leading the committee which devised the Orwell Award, which has enabled life-changing opportunities for 12 boys per year in the sixth form since its inception in 2019.I'm delighted to connect: please reach out to me on LI or via twitter @arbuthnotttom.