Biography

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View a selection of his recent consulting work

Tom Weaver is an experienced senior executive and consultant operating primarily within the built environment and real estate industries, with a particular focus on creating knowledge economy environments in the commercial and educational markets.

His first senior level position came as President of AIESEC UK, the UK branch of a global NGO focussed on leadership development and exchange programmes. As the head of the organisation in its 50th year, he and his team pushed the organisation to break through a glass ceiling of results that had plateaued and remained static for the previous three years. During this experience he delivered a significant number of presentations and speeches to large audiences and began to build a reputation as an engaging public speaker.

Following this experience, he joined a small, entrepreneurial consultancy, Bryanston Square, where he worked on a series of PFI and Building Schools for the Future projects, helping to reset thinking and inject a user perspective into design processes. He was an educational design consultant to the successful Skanska team in Bristol BSF, the first project to close in the country. He delivered a number of keynotes for organisations like NCSL, PfS and a variety of local authorities. After three years he felt he had more questions than answers about the future of school design, and was convinced that no existing company in the industry had the intellectual power to solve the problems he saw: that schools were challenging the way pupils learn, but building new buildings that were incapable of evolving over the decades as learning changed. A classroom designed today would on the most part stay the same size and shape over the next thirty year period.

A chance meeting at a conference with Professor John Worthington, founder of DEGW, an expert on adaptable environments, led him to join the internationally renowned design strategy company, responsible for outstanding thought leadership in workplace design, and design strategy, with clients such as Google, Accenture and GlaxoSmithKline. DEGW was interested in bringing its expertise to the schools market and in 2006 he joined it to work with the Global Director of Learning and Research, Andrew Harrison, to do just that.

At DEGW he found a wealth of cutting edge thinking about designing environments just waiting to be adapted to the educational marketplace. Soon, he had the opportunity to contribute thinking of his own as the Project Manager of DEGW’s Project Faraday team, spending a year working with two schools and the Department for Children, Schools and Families to rethink the way science accommodation should be designed. The DEGW approach involved dissecting science into pedagogies, formulating settings by which those pedagogies could best be supported, and designing the final environment around the learning settings.

This ground up approach was revolutionary within the school design sector within the UK and led DEGW to win a further two year project around designing schools to best support personalised learning. He was also responsible for Changing Boundaries, for the National College for School Leadership, a change management toolkit developed in partnership with DEMOS, that all schools going through Building Schools for the Future will utilise to define and manage their change agenda and connect it to their school building project. This, alongside his other work for the National College for School Leadership, has recently been nominated for the RIBA President's Award for Research 2008. Following a successful period of keynotes and presentations for the NCSL BSF Leadership Programme, he began to present to Local Authorities and schools directly about issues concerning the effective use of space for learning, change management, adaptable buildings, the evolving workplace and pedagogic briefing.

Since leaving DEGW at the close of 2007, he has been more involved in changing other types of real estate, initially in the residential space at Deputy Chief Operating Officer of Nice Group, then looking innovatively at commercial workspace, creating a design brief based on the outcomes of a £3M European Union research project by DEGW, aiming to create the next generation of corporate real estate solutions for the nomadic worker, targeted at knowledge economy businesses.

After generating an increasing amount of consulting work he started Flywheel Ltd, and currently has a variety of clients, from Local Authorities to private sector bidder qualifying for BSF.  Some of his recent, major projects are described below.

 

Recent Consulting Projects

DEGW, for Department for Children, Schools and Families, April 2009 to January 2011
Space for Personalised Learning: Lead Consultant

• Took over the Lead Consultant role of Space for Personalised Learning role, representing DEGW and leading a consortium comprising of DEGW, Futurelab, Prenoye & Prasad, and EdisonLearning.
• Working to look at the spatial implications of personalised learning at various levels of intervention within a school building project.

National College for School Leadership, January 2009 to May 2009
Redesign of the BSF Leadership Programme

• Redesigned the existing programme to utilise a problem based learning approach, supporting participants in gaining a deeper understanding of key components of the programme, and to utilise more technology and a better learning environment.
• Co-created an overall framework that integrated three strands of interaction, including a small amount of plenary style information transmission, a greater amount of interaction in school groups to define the BSF vision, change management plan and educational brief, and integrated problem based learning themes from educational systems to technology and space, building upon earlier Design Journey work.
• New programme will be piloted at the end of March 2009.

National College for School Leadership, June 2008 to December 2008
Creation of a Design Journey model for the BSF Leadership Programme

• Created a unified learning-space model that drew together thinking from Project Faraday, Kenn Fisher’s Linking Pedagogy and Space, and Partnerships for Schools Guidance on BB98 and the SSfC/OBC briefs into a coherent framework.
• Chaired and facilitated a variety of think-tanks utilising experience from experienced head teachers and industry representatives, including PfS, BCSE, and Futurelab.
• Framework is designed to create a link between the educational system of curriculum, pedagogy, school operations and ethos, and the spatial design of a school, from the setting to the suite.
• Established a common vocabulary of design terminology to be used across all bodies.

National College for School Leadership, July 2008 to December 2008
Creation of generic learning settings and scenes for the BSF Leadership Programme

• Worked with a designer to create a series of generic learning settings and learning scenes.
• Both settings and scenes were designed using educational theory based Diana Laurillard’s evolution of Pask’s Conversational Theory for constructing learning through interactions.
• Final works will be fully integrated into the BSF Leadership Programme, and form the basis of an interactive briefing tool.

National College for School Leadership, September 2008 to November 2008
Creation and delivery of a Student Designers Day

• Created and delivered a stakeholder engagement workshop involving primary school learners, the first year of secondary school and university fourth year furniture designers.
• The learners worked in groups to create design solutions that made use of dead space underneath stairwells, using a wide range of materials such as play-doh, cardboard and pipe-cleaners.
• Two university students facilitated each learner group and also produced 3D renders of the solutions on the fly, using laptops and 3D modelling software.

Nomad Property, February 2008 to July 2008
Creation of a design brief for commercial workspace

• Created a full design brief for a new type of commercial workspace, from space budget to adjacency modelling.
• Workspace was to facilitate mobile working, with customers from a wide variety of companies sharing space.
• Challenges included supporting privacy whilst allowing freedom and interaction.

Nice Group, December 2008 to February 2008
Construction and delivery of company-wide visioning and strategy process

• Created a stakeholder visioning and strategy development process for a 120 person company.
• Created a custom framework linking values to vision to strategy to operations plans.
• Facilitated workshops to forge a consensus from Director level to employees.

Department for Children, Schools and Families, October 2006 to December 2007
Project Faraday: new spaces for science

• Project Manager and Lead Consultant of the DEGW Project Faraday consortium, one of three consortia appointed by the DCSF to create exemplar science accommodation for Building Schools for the Future.
• Focus on creating a replicable process, rather than just a menu of design, linking from vision to learning to space in a coherent way that would most enable innovation.
• Created and ran a wide series of stakeholder events during the design process, working with learners, staff, senior management and governors.

National College for School Leadership, June 2007 to October 2007
Changing Boundaries: change management and space

• Created, researched and wrote Changing Boundaries, a tool that allowed schools to map their planned evolution of the school system, such as curriculum and timetable, and link it to space.
• The tool allowed a variety of change plans to be integrated and mapped a number of existing schools and their change process.
• One of the only change management tools in the learning sector that had a specific focus on evolving the building. Can be used in tandem with other more people oriented tools, such as Bridge, or the TDA SIPF model.
• Widely praised and used within the BSF Leadership Programme, and adopted by many educational consultants working with Local Authorities.