Governing Body

The Governing Body meets at least three times a year and is supported in its work by a number of committees. Each Governor is listed below with details of the committees on which they sit. If you wish to contact the Chair of the Governing Body, please email the Clerk to the Governing Body, Mrs Diana Robinson, or write c/o the Clerk to Governing Body, Westminster School, 17a Dean’s Yard, London, SW1P 3PF. If you are interested in supporting the life and community of the School by becoming a Governor please contact the Clerk.

Chair
Mr Mark Batten (
OW An OW is an 'Old Westminster', a former pupil and member of the School's alumni.
)

Chair

Mark is an Old Westminster and has been a Governor of the School since 2014. He was appointed Chair in 2020. Mark is also Chair of the School's Governance and Nominations Committee and a member of the Finance and General Purposes and the Remuneration Committees.

Mark’s other roles include Chair of Assured Guaranty UK and iNED of Picton Property Income and the Royal Brompton and Harefield Clinical Group. Mark is also Chair of the Royal St George’s Championship Committee for the 2021 Open Golf Championship.

Mark was a partner at PwC from 1990 until 2017, when he retired from the firm.  His primary area of expertise involved the reorganisation and restructuring of companies and businesses, particularly in the banking, insurance and real estate sectors. Mark is a graduate of Oxford University, a Chartered Accountant and formerly a licensed Insolvency Practitioner.

Ex Officio and Nominated
The Dean of Westminster, The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle MBE

Ex Officio Member and Senior Governor

David has worked as Dean of Magdalene College, Cambridge, as a Vicar in North London, as a Canon of Gloucester Cathedral and as Dean of Bristol. David was installed as Dean of Westminster in November 2019. He has a doctorate in History from Cambridge. He has worked for the national church and published three books. David chaired the College of English Deans in 2019 and he was awarded an MBE in 2020 for work in Bristol with vulnerable communities.

David is also Chair of the School's Remuneration Committee.

Ms Emily Reid (
OW An OW is an 'Old Westminster', a former pupil and member of the School's alumni.
)

Nominated Common Room Governor

Emily is a regulatory partner at Hogan Lovells, focussing on banking, payments and lending and on the FinTech sector. Until recently she led the global Financial Services Practice and is currently heading up its consulting team.

She has held several management positions at Hogan Lovells including serving on the Board and chairing the Global Citizenship Programme.

Emily is also a member of the School's Audit, Risk and Compliance and the Governance and Nominations Committees.

The Reverend Canon David Stanton

Nominated Abbey Governor

The Reverend David Stanton is Sub-Dean and Canon Treasurer at Westminster Abbey. He is also a Distinguished Friend of Oxford University, Vice-Chair of Court at Westminster University and an Independent member of both the National Public Services Honours Committee and Remuneration Committee at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was previously Church Commissioner for England, Non-Executive at the Wales Audit Office, and Vice Chair of Oxford University Research Ethics Committee (Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions).

David is also a member of the School's Audit, Risk and Compliance and Investments Committees, and he oversees boarding at the School.

Appointed Members
Mr Basi Akpabio (
OW An OW is an 'Old Westminster', a former pupil and member of the School's alumni.
)

Appointed Member

Basi is Creative Director at Agatha Christie Ltd with a focus on Film and TV. He has been part of the team responsible for bringing new audiences to the ‘Queen of Crime’ with English language adaptations such as And Then There Were None, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, as well as Disney’s big screen Poirot franchise. Globally he has helped develop shows in Sweden, France, Japan, South Korea, India and China.

Basi also has a BA in History from Girton College, Cambridge and is a former Westminster pupil. He lives in London with his husband.

Basi is also a member of the School's Education Committee.

Dr Sarah Anderson

Appointed Member and Safeguarding Link Governor

Sarah works for the UK Health Security Agency where she co-leads the Programme Delivery Unit. Prior to this she was National Lead for Tuberculosis (TB) Strategy and TB Programme Delivery. She previously worked as a regional epidemiologist, a consultant in Health Protection, a clinician, and a GP. Alongside Sarah’s paid work, she is a medical adviser to the Royal Geographical Society where she advises expeditions on medical issues and co-edits the ‘Oxford Handbook of Expedition and Wilderness Medicine.’

Sarah is also a member of the School's Education Committee.

Mr Nabeel Bhanji (
OW An OW is an 'Old Westminster', a former pupil and member of the School's alumni.
)

Appointed Member

Nabeel is a Senior Portfolio Manager at Elliott Investment Management, an investment firm with more than $50 billion in assets under management where he has a global mandate focused on activist and special situations investing.

Prior to joining Elliott in 2012, Nabeel worked in private equity at Apax Partners and Goldman Sachs. Nabeel attended both the Westminster Under School and the Great School and holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters.

Nabeel is also the interim Chair of the School's Finance and General Purposes and a member of the Investments Committees.

Mr Edward Cartwright (
OW An OW is an 'Old Westminster', a former pupil and member of the School's alumni.
)

Appointed member, Estates Link Governor and Interim Health and Safety Link Governor

Edward has over three decades’ experience in global financial markets. He spent 20 years in investment banking and over a decade more in fund management. Roles included Head of Japanese equities at Jefferies & Co, Global Head of Research at Commerzbank Securities, and Head of Listed Investment Companies at LGT Capital Partners. He became CEO of Arcus in 2019 and is Chair of Hub Residential Ltd and of Squarestone Operations.

Edward is also a member of the Finance and General Purposes, the Governance and Nominations and the Investments Committees.

Ms Jessica Cecil

Appointed Member and Special Educational Needs and Disability Link Governor

Jessica is a leading media industry figure and an expert in the field of disinformation, currently working as a consultant to media and tech companies. She founded the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), the world’s only alliance of major international tech companies and news organisations to counter the most harmful disinformation in real time.

Jessica was for many years at the BBC and served as Chief of Staff to four Directors-General. She also led a 30 partner-strong initiative to get the world to learn how to code. The result was the creation, manufacture and distribution of a codeable computer, the micro:bit. 6 million micro:bits have now been sold in 50 countries and are used by 25m children from Singapore to Finland.
Jessica’s background is as a news journalist and documentary maker. She was an international news producer and assistant editor of BBC Newsnight. She is an Emmy nominee for the prime time TV science documentary Human Instinct.

Jessica is a Non-Executive Director of the Digital Catapult, the UK authority on advanced digital technology. Jessica is also a Trustee of the University of Bristol, where she chairs the Equity, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Oversight Committee. She sits on the Council of Advisors for RAND Europe and is an Adjunct Fellow of the Queen Elizabeth II Leadership School at Chatham House, the Royal Institute for International Affairs.

Jessica is also a member of the School's Education Committee.

Mr John Colenutt

Appointed Member and Deputy Chair

John taught Economics at Westminster School after graduating from Oxford in 1984. He then worked as an economist at HM Treasury before moving to the City in the late 1980s, where he spent most of his career as a partner at the investment bank Cazenove (later JPMorgan Cazenove), with roles including Chief Operating Officer.

In 2010, John joined the educational charity Teach First as Chief Operating Officer, and later became acting Chief Executive Officer. In 2014, he moved to Genomics plc, a tech spin out from Oxford University, taking the business from start-up through early growth phase. He recently studied for a Masters in history at King’s College, and is now COO and Director of the ‘healthtech’ business, Mobilise Care Ltd.

John is also Chair of the School's Audit, Risk and Compliance Committee and a member of the Education and the Remuneration Committees.

Professor Maggie Dallman OBE

Appointed Member and Diversity and Inclusion Link Governor

Maggie is Vice President (International), Associate Provost (Academic Partnerships) and Professor of Immunology at Imperial College London. In her Vice President and Associate Provost roles, Maggie is the academic lead on, respectively, the College's International Relations, Schools Outreach, and Societal Engagement Strategies.

Maggie joined Imperial College in 1994 as a lecturer in the Department of Biology, coming from the University of Oxford where she had held a Nuffield Medical Research Foundation Junior Research Fellowship followed by an MRC Senior Research Fellowship. At Imperial College she became Reader in Immunoregulation in 1996 and Professor of Immunology in 1999. Maggie has held a variety of senior positions at Imperial College, becoming Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences in 2008. Maggie took up her roles as Associate Provost (Academic Partnerships) and Vice President (International) in January 2015 and February 2018 respectively.

Maggie has over 35 years of experience in experimental research in university and industrial environments. Her interests have focused on understanding dysregulated and inappropriate immune responses with the goal of developing novel biomarkers and therapeutic interventions.

Maggie participates in a range of external activities: currently, she is Director and Trustee of the Francis Crick Institute and adviser to several International Universities.

Maggie is also a member of the School's Education Committee.

Dr Tristram Hunt

Appointed Member

Dr Tristram Hunt is the Director of the V&A, the world’s leading museum of art, design and performance. Since taking up the post in 2017, he has championed design education in UK schools, encouraged debate around the history of the museum’s global collections and overseen the transition to a multi-site museum. Formerly Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent he has a doctorate in Victorian history from Cambridge University and is the author of several books, including, most recently, the Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (2021).

Tristram is also a member of the School's Archives and Education Committees.

Dr Dominic Luckett

Appointed Member

Educated at the University of Leicester and Magdalen College, Oxford, Dominic was Head of History at Harrow and then Deputy Head at Worth School. He was appointed Headmaster of Mill Hill in 2007 before becoming Headmaster of Sherborne in 2016. He has published various articles on early Tudor history, has been a governor of several schools and was a member of the Council of the University of Leicester between 2009 and 2018. In 2019, he was named as the Tatler Best Head of a Public School.

Dominic is also a member of the School's Education Committee.

Mr Richard Neville-Rolfe MA (
OW An OW is an 'Old Westminster', a former pupil and member of the School's alumni.
)

Appointed Member

Richard was educated at Westminster School from 1972-1975 and attended New College, Oxford from 1976-1979 where he obtained Honour Moderations in Mathematics and graduated with honours in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

He worked at James Capel & Co from 1985 to 1990, the HSBC Group from 1990 to 2003 and Odey Asset Management from 2003 to 2008. He is currently an Investment Director at Odey Wealth Management. He is married with three children.

Richard is also Chair of the School's Investments Committee and a member of both the Finance and General Purposes Committee and the Estates Strategic Committee.

Mrs Claire Oulton

Appointed Member and Interim Link Governor for Westminster Under School

Claire Oulton read Modern History at Oxford and then did her PGCE at King’s College, London.

She started her teaching career at Benenden and, after four years there, was appointed Head of History at Charterhouse, a role she held for six years. In 1994, at the age of 32, she was appointed Head of St Catherine’s Bramley (750 pupils, 4-18, all girls, boarding and day). From 2000-2014, Claire was Head of Benenden (550 pupils, 11-18, all boarding). During her time at Benenden, Claire helped set up an Academy and sat on its Governing Body and Education Committee for some years.

In 2014, Claire stepped down from headship as she felt that twenty years in that role was enough for anyone. RSAcademics then asked Claire to head up their executive recruitment division and she was appointed Head of Leadership Appointments UK. As such, Claire oversees all their CEO and Headship appointments across the UK.

Claire has spent many years on the GB of Charterhouse and then Harrow; she also sits on the grant-making committees of various charities. Claire lives on the Isle of Wight and is married to Nick, a publisher, and has two daughters.

Claire is also Chair of the School's Education Committee and a member of the Remuneration Committee.

Ms Joanna Reesby

Appointed Member

Joanna founded Mission Bay Limited, since merged with SRI, and is one of the UK’s leading media executive search and consultancy firms, working globally. Previously, she launched the London office of a US based media search boutique and later led the media division of Korn Ferry International / Whitehead Mann, London.

Prior to this, Joanna was at Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, working across a wide range of commercial activities and projects. She also spent seven years with Hasbro Inc., as global Senior Vice President of Visual Media and Head of International Licensing consecutively. Joanna began her career as an intellectual property lawyer in the U.K. with Herbert Smith and Denton Hall and New Zealand with Bell Gully. She has an LLB (Hons) from the University of Auckland and an LLM from the University of Cambridge.

Joanna is also a member of the School's Governance and Nominations Committee.

Ms Grace Yu

Appointed Member

Grace has over three decades of leadership experience in environmental conservation and sustainability. She is currently a trustee of The Aurora Trust (a Sainsbury Family Charitable Trust), a grant-making charity addressing climate change. She is an advisor and trustee of a number of other environmental organisations: the African Rainforest Trust, Conservation International, the Rainforest Alliance, and the Cyclades Preservation Fund. Grace is also a leader in developing the seaweed farming industry in Scotland, where she is a founding advisor to EcoCascade, a social enterprise company which provides primary processing to local farmers.

A licensed attorney, Grace has a son and a daughter that are former Westminster pupils, and was the chair of Westminster School Parents Committee (WSPC) during their attendance.

Grace is also a member of the School's Estates Strategic Committee.

Mr Trevor Bradley

Appointed Member

Trevor spent 13 years as a portfolio manager, Partner and Main Board Director at investment management firm Ruffer LLP. Prior to that he worked at McKinsey & Company and was a portfolio manager at Mercury Asset Management.

He is now a Non-Executive Director of Abrdn Diversified Income and Growth Trust, and a Director of a private family investment company, where he chairs the Investment Committee. He is also a Trustee Director of BBC Children in Need and chairs their Investment Committee, too.

He is a Justice of the Peace, sitting in Westminster and City Magistrates' Courts and holds a first class degree in Natural Sciences from Queens' College, Cambridge.

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