Our Strategic and Management Groups

Thursday, 04 March 2010 16:10

Executive Board

Our Executive Board provides management leadership to the organisation and addresses issues of strategic importance to the organisation. Our work is broken down into four directorates, each with one strategic leader. The group is led by Glenys Stacey.

Glenys Stacey

Glenys is a solicitor by profession, and has been a public sector chief executive for twelve years. She is experienced in both start-up and growth strategies, in working in complex casework environments and in the role of regulation and of strategic regulators.

She joined Ofqual as its Chief Executive in March 2011. Before that she was the Chief Executive of Standards for England, joining them in April 2008. In 2004, she was appointed as the first Chief Executive of Animal Health, the Executive Agency responsible for managing the field response to outbreaks of notifiable animal disease such as Avian Influenza and Foot and Mouth. In that role she worked closely with local authorities in planning for and managing disease outbreaks and day to day animal health work, and led large scale programmes of work to simplify and reform the regulatory environment.

Formerly, she was first Chief Executive of the Greater Manchester Magistrates' Courts Committee (800 staff, 3,000 magistrates) delivering summary justice in ten courthouses. The largest provincial Magistrates’ Courts’ Committee, it played a lead role in delivering the Government’s criminal justice policies, dealing with some 800,000 cases annually. Her first chief executive role was establishing the Criminal Cases Review Commission, an NDPB responsible for the review and investigation of suspected miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Dennis Opposs

Dennis is our Director of Standards, responsible for ensuring that the standards of qualifications are maintained and keeping under review all aspects of National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage assessment arrangements.

Over a number of years, Dennis has held senior roles in the regulation of examinations and qualifications – including for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority where he had responsibility for GCSE and A level science subjects and was involved in the early development of National Curriculum science tests.

In his early career, Dennis taught chemistry and other sciences in comprehensive schools in north London and Hertfordshire.

Fiona Pethick

Fiona Pethick is Director of Regulation at Ofqual. Her responsibilities include: overseeing our regulatory role in Northern Ireland, developing our regulatory approach and ensuring the regulatory decisions we take are fair, robust and evidence based. Since joining Ofqual she has concentrated on getting the legislation we need to regulate effectively and on designing Ofqual's approach to regulating the sector.

Before joining Ofqual she spent 19 years with Ofwat, the economic regulator for the water industry where she was Director of Corporate Affairs. Fiona's responsibilities included directing the review of water price limits, public relations and policy development.

During the 1980's Fiona was a Statistician in the Department of Employment. She graduated in Economics at Durham University and qualified in statistics at Oxford University.

Francis Thomas

As Director of Internal and External Affairs, Francis is responsible for ensuring that our key messages and corporate image build a reputation for the organisation as a transparent, independent and trusted regulator. The group includes the human resources function and all internal and external communications.

Francis has over 20 years' senior management experience, gained across both the public and private sectors.

Jeremy Benson

Jeremy joined Ofqual as Director of Strategic Management in October 2010. The Strategic Management Directorate is responsible for Ofqual's strategic planning, finance, legal, governance and corporate services.

Before joining Ofqual, Jeremy had worked in the Department for Education and its predecessors for fifteen years. This included six years working on qualifications policy, three years in finance and a secondment to a university.

Wider Management Group

Our wider management group is the senior team who manage our day to day operations and provide leadership to the organisation. In addition to the strategic executive group the following staff make up the management group.

Cath Jadhav

Cath is Head of Qualifications Standards and manages the work of our General and Vocational Qualifications Standards teams and the International Standards and Comparability team, whose work involves looking at standards over time as well comparing standards in English qualifications with those available internationally. Cath worked for AQA and its predecessor AEB for a number of years, taking on a number of different roles managing existing qualifications, as well as developing new ones. Her most recent post before joining Ofqual involved responsibility for a range of different qualifications in the Business and Social Sciences area. These included GCSE, GCE, Diploma and the Foundation, Higher and Extended Project.

Janet Holloway

Janet is Head of 14-19 Qualifications Regulation. She is responsible for the team that develops and implements the regulatory policies for 14-19 qualifications, including for acceptance of qualifications on to the Register of Regulated Qualifications. Janet taught chemistry and other sciences in comprehensive schools and colleges in England and abroad before joining one of AQA's predecessor organisations, the North West Regional Examinations Board offering CSE examinations. She has had several senior roles managing the development of new qualifications and their delivery to centres. Her most recent post before joining Ofqual involved overarching responsibility for the majority of AQA's qualifications including GCSE, GCE, Diploma, Functional Skills and the AQA Baccalaureate.

Stephen Anwyll

Steve is the Head of 3-14 Assessment and leads on work to regulate national assessment arrangements from the Early Years Foundation Stage to Key Stage 3.

He started his career as a primary teacher and then moved into Local Authority work as an advisory teacher, adviser and Ofsted registered inspector with a particular focus on literacy and English. He joined the National Literacy Strategy as a Regional Director when it was established in 1998 and worked with Local Authorities across the country. He became National Director for Literacy in 2001. He returned to Local Authority work as Head of a School Effectiveness Service and then joined QCA in 2006 where he worked on national curriculum reviews, the development of materials to exemplify national standards, teacher assessment and national moderation. Steve joined Ofqual at the start of 2011.

Julie Swan

Julie is our Head of Regulatory Policy and heads up a team which leads on a wide range of policy developments, including the Qualifications and Credit Framework and access to qualifications. Her previous roles have included Director of Development with the Quality Assurance Agency for higher education. In this role she led the work to develop the academic infrastructure for higher education, including responsibility for a code of practice for assuring quality and standards, subject benchmarks and the framework for higher education qualifications for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. More recently Julie was head of education for the Law Society of England and Wales where she was responsible for the regulation of solicitors' education and training both before and after qualification.

Clare Gilligan

Clare Gilligan is Head of Awarding Organisation Performance. She is responsible for the recognition of awarding organisations, accreditation of their qualifications, the monitoring of awarding organisations and working with them and other stakeholders to ensure the successful delivery of examinations and results.

Her previous roles have included Head of Education and Training at the Solicitors Regulation Authority where she led on the reform of the solicitor's qualification and managed the quality assurance of training and assessment providers.

Clare has also worked at the Legal Services Commission where she developed and implemented a variety of quality standards and quality assurance techniques for the management of legal aid.

Emma Cochrane

Emma Cochrane is our Head of Economic Regulation. The team which Emma heads leads on policy developments relating to securing the efficient provision of regulated qualifications and in particular that any sums payable to a body awarding or authenticating a regulated qualification in respect of the award or authentication represent value for money.

Emma’s previous roles include Head of Corporate Finance with the water regulator Ofwat, as well as roles with Network Rail and London Electricity. She has experience of developing policy on the funding of large capital investment programmes, as well as dealing with a wide range of economic regulation and commercial issues and regulatory policy issues generally.

Liz Reed

Liz Reed is the Head of HR for Ofqual. In her role, she is responsible for setting the strategic direction for HR, supporting the delivery of the corporate-level people priorities and ensuring the function works within an organisational context.

Liz has worked extensively in both public and private sector HR environments, covering the banking sector, retail and local government. She has previously led the HR set-up of a new Internet Bank and undertaken a trouble-shooting role for a major recruitment agency at one of their key client accounts. In her specialist area of resourcing, Liz managed the largest recruitment outsourced contract of its time to ensure the successful delivery of resourcing requirements to three UK Call Centres for a retail bank. Most recently, she was the Resourcing Manager for QCA, before moving to her current role in Ofqual.

Helen Knee

Helen is currently our Head of Strategic Planning. Over the next six months she will be working with and supporting Ofqual’s Board and Executive, to lead the development of Ofqual’s strategy and reporting arrangements to support its ambitions to be a respected and strategic regulator; and in particular, oversee publication of its first Parliamentary reports and the preparation of a three year strategy. Helen has worked in education for the last fifteen years - including stints in education policy development, corporate services delivery and project management.

Steven Harrison

As our Head of Corporate Management, Steven is responsible for corporate services and planning.

Steven originally trained as a teacher and worked for several years in education before moving into the wider public sector. During that time he worked on business planning and organisational development in the NHS and then used his experience in the start up of new organisations where his roles focused on public administration and corporate services delivery.

Alan Little

Alan is our Head of Finance. He is responsible for providing a full financial management service to Ofqual, liaising with HM Treasury and other relevant Government Departments and external Stakeholders.

Alan qualified as an accountant with the NHS and spent the next 14 years there undertaking a variety of senior finance roles. Prior to joining Ofqual, he worked for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and was responsible for the implementation and management of its financial systems.

Colin Rattray

Colin is the Programme Management Office (PMO) Manager. The main responsibilities of the PMO are to monitor and report against Ofqual’s Business Plan (strategic priorities and prioritised achievements), specifically around performance and risk.

Colin’s previous roles have included Business Transformation Programme Manager, Programme Manager and Change Manager, working in both Private and Public sectors. He has worked, amongst other for the Gambling Commission and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

Last Updated on Friday, 11 November 2011 11:40 Tags: ofqual, management, executive, team, group, executive board, wider management group