Meet the trustees

Judy is a Londoner who moved to Hereford with her large family in 1977. Her early years in Hereford were spent looking after her family before she obtained employment with the local authority.

After three years, she joined the Post Office, where she worked until retiring from Post Office Ltd in 2016. During her time there, she was appointed as a Magistrate on the Hereford Bench and served for over ten years, with the Post Office supporting her in undertaking this role.

Following retirement, she cared for her mother-in-law, who had dementia, until her passing in 2017. Judy then became a school governor at Stoke Prior, a small rural primary school, and Barrs Court, a special school in Hereford. A few years later, she became a governor at St Weonards, a small rural primary school which is part of a MAT. She was also invited to sit on the audit committee of Hereford College of Arts and has recently joined its Trust Board. In addition, she serves on appeal, grievance, and independent review panels for the local authority.

In her free time, Judy enjoys baking. She is passionate about small schools and is delighted to be a newly appointed Trustee for NASS. She looks forward to working with her fellow Trustees to support small schools, which she believes are an invaluable asset to the communities they serve.

Rebecca works with headteachers whose relationships with their governing boards have become strained, ineffective, or broken. As founder of Break Through the Boardroom, and drawing on over 20 years of experience across the education sector, Rebecca helps headteachers build strong, strategic partnerships with their boards by teaching practical, comfortable strategies that can be used immediately in the boardroom.

Rebecca began her career in educational publishing and then as a primary school teacher in East London, where she later became a SAPERE Philosophy for Children (P4C) facilitator and consultant, developing the questioning and dialogue skills that now sit at the heart of her coaching work.

For the past decade, she has supported, coached, and mentored leaders across the public and private sectors to create the conditions where people slow down, ask better questions, and think more clearly together. Rebecca is a qualified coach and EIA Senior Practitioner (EMCC). She also serves as Chair of an NGA Award-Winning Board.

Sonia has worked in education for over twenty years in Lincolnshire and Norfolk, fourteen of which were spent as a successful headteacher in three different schools. Her first substantive headship was in a small rural Church of England primary school in Norfolk. In two of her headships, she led the schools through new whole-school builds.

Sonia is currently a director of a not-for-profit school improvement company which supports many schools, including a number of very small schools that have their own group within the network. She is a school governor and supports new headteachers through the local education leaders association. Sonia holds an MA in Education, an NPQH, and is a Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching.

She has been a NASS Trustee since 2022 and is particularly keen to explore how professional development can be successfully planned, delivered, and implemented in and across small schools through effective collaborative working and system leadership.

Julie recently retired after forty years in primary teaching, beginning her career in London and then working in Gloucestershire and Hampshire. Her last fifteen years were spent as the headteacher of a small school, a role she loved, although it became increasingly challenging.

She is also a trustee on the Portsmouth Diocesan Board of Education, where she represents small schools, many of which are in partnership with the Church of England. She is also a guest lecturer at Winchester University, with a focus on the use of teaching assistants in small schools.

Julie continues to be an official with the National Association of Headteachers and is currently carrying out research into the impact of OFSTED on the health and wellbeing of leaders and staff in schools.

Catherine is deeply passionate about small schools, with her own children having benefited enormously from a small school education. She was the Chair of Governors for a Church of England small school for five years and has the privilege of working with many small schools.

Through this experience, she has come to understand how wonderfully unique small schools are and the huge value they add to the children and communities they serve. She understands just how hard leaders of small schools work to balance educational and financial sustainability at a time of immense resource pressure.

Joanna is the Executive Headteacher of two small Church of England infant and nursery schools in the former coalfields of Nottinghamshire. With nearly twenty years’ experience serving these communities, she has developed a deep appreciation of the distinctive role small schools play in the lives of children and their families. Her earlier work as a National Strategy consultant involved extensive support for small schools across the East Midlands, strengthening her understanding of their unique character as well as their challenges.

She also serves as a governor in a neighbouring local authority and is a long-standing member of the National Association of Small Schools, where she continues to advocate for the sector. Joanna’s commitment to small-school education is rooted in many years of working closely with these settings and seeing first-hand the difference they make to the pupils and families they serve.

Gillian has over 30 years of teaching experience, including work in a secondary school in Nigeria and primary schools in Somalia, Liverpool, Cheshire, Berkshire, and Oxfordshire. She has been involved in educational research throughout her career and worked in a wide range of leadership roles before being appointed headteacher.

As a leading teacher, she worked on school improvement initiatives in a small group of schools; and as headteacher, she led her small school from Requires Improvement to Good in Ofsted, and to Good with Outstanding Leadership and Management in SIAMS.

She holds an NPQH, a postgraduate qualification in SENCO, an MEd, and an MRes in Children’s Literature. She is currently studying part-time for a PhD in Education, exploring small school closure in England and its impacts on people and place.

Alison spent the first part of her teaching career in a variety of primary schools before a short spell teaching BEd students at Christchurch University in Canterbury. During one of her teaching sessions, she needed a Numeracy Strategy video—before the days of DVDs or YouTube—and visited a small rural school nearby to borrow one. To her surprise, she left not only with the video, but also with an application form for the headship, beginning her adventure as a headteacher.

Twenty-one years later, in 2023, Alison decided it was time to retire and begin a new adventure. She is passionate about the important role that small schools play in their communities and the effective education they provide for children. In retirement, alongside morris dancing, bellringing, barbershop singing, and being a grandmother, she is delighted to take on the role of Secretary and Trustee of NASS and to help ensure the voice of small schools is heard across the country.