Dame Allan's Schools Lecture Series

We have invited Newcastle United host Justin Lockwood to hold a conversation with two Australian sporting greats Marcus North and Ryan Campbell. They will share two powerful stories of leadership, resilience, teamwork and life beyond sport. They will not only discuss their extraordinary journeys and their challenging lives, but also the mistakes they made and the lessons they learned both on and off the field. Whether you love sport or not, this is an evening for everyone seeking inspiration, strength, and insight. After successful cricketing careers Marcus North is now the director of Durham Cricket Club and Ryan Campbell is the head coach. Marcus played 21 tests and two ODIs for Australia and during his time in English cricket he became the first player of any nationality to represent six different counties. Ryan represented Australia and Hong Kong in his playing days. Before joining Durham he coached the Dutch national team at the 2022 T20 World Cup.

Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock PhD is a space scientist whose passion is presenting science to a general audience and demonstrating that you ‘don’t need a brain the size of a small planet’ to understand, participate in and enjoy science. She has spent her career making novel, bespoke instrumentation in both the industrial and academic environments including working on the James Webb Space Telescope and various satellite monitoring climate change. In 2004 Maggie founded “Science Innovation Ltd”. Through this company she conducts public engagement activities, sharing her love of space and encouraging underrepresented communities to take up STEM. As well as public speaking she is a bafta nominated TV presenter, co-hosting the world’s longest-running science television program “The Sky at Night”. She is also an author with her recent children’s book “Am I made of Stardust” winning a Royal Society book prize. She was made a Dame in the 2023 New Year’s Honours list.

Marcus Child was the speaker that began the whole series. If you or your child need a little motivation, then come to this talk and leave with a bucketful. The buzz in the room after his last lecture was palpable. Marcus Child has won 40 awards, worked in 36 countries and enjoyed 27 years of speaking to business leaders. He inspires confidence, wholeheartedness and courage... and is known for helping thousands of people in hundreds of big brands and SMEs embrace daily life and times of change, positively and successfully. In stirring conversations with his audiences he kindles resourcefulness and self-belief in individuals, positivity between colleagues and trust between organisations and their customers. He speaks with pace, humour and exceptional energy. Marcus has helped an astonishing number of business leaders and teams, sportspeople, politicians, teenagers and people living with health challenges realise bold and extraordinary goals.

Matthew Syed is an author and highly acclaimed speaker in the field of high performance. He has written seven best-selling books on the subject of mindset and high performance – Bounce, Black Box Thinking, Rebel Ideas, The Greatest, and his celebrated children’s books, What Do You Think?, You Are Awesome and Dare To Be You – and has worked with many leading organisations to build a mindset of continuous improvement. He is also a multi-award-winning journalist for The Times and The Sunday Times and presenter of the popular BBC Radio 4 programme, Sideways, currently in its sixth series. Matthew is a regular contributor to television and radio and, in his previous career, was the England table tennis number one for almost a decade. Matthew’s work explores a thought-provoking approach to high performance in the context of a complex and fast-changing world.

Dr Lucy Worsley is, by day Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces and by night a writer of history books. Somewhere in between she also finds the time to present TV series on a range of historical subjects. She will give an illustrated tour through the dark story of our fascination with murder. Lucy has covered the history of this very British obsession in a book and BBC TV series. Here she shares its secrets and explores the history of this phenomenon in forensic detail, examining not only the crimes themselves but also how murder became a form of middle-class entertainment through novels, plays, artefacts and the press. From a Regency serial killer to Agatha Christie, this is the story of how crime was turned into art.

Jo Fairley became Britain's youngest-ever magazine editor, at the age of 23, and spent her twenties editing Look Now, then the iconic fashion magazine Honey. She then went on to found the pioneering organic and Fairtrade chocolate company Green & Black's with her husband, Craig Sams, building it into a global ethical brand. She has gone on to create several serial ventures, two in her home town of Hastings – Judges Bakery (a one-stop organic and natural food store) and The Wellington Centre (a nine-room boutique wellbeing centre), as well as two online ventures, perfumesociety.org and beautybible.com. She is author of 25 books including Sweet Dreams: The Story of Green & Black's.

Chairman of family business, Warburtons, Jonathan has overseen the company’s transition into a national brand with the business having achieved growth of over 60% to a turnover in excess of £550m and bakery and distribution sites growing by over 40%. He was also the brains behind the development of Warburtons iconic TV ad campaign, featuring members of the Warburton family. He will discuss how he helped turn Warburton’s into a national brand and Britain’s favourite baker.

An international speaker, bestselling author and co- host of The High Performance Podcast, Professor Damian Hughes combines his practical and academic background with sport, organisational development and change psychology to help organisations, including a wide range of international and national sporting teams, create a high performing culture. He will cover what it is that makes particular ideas and stories stick in our minds. He shows how reframing our understanding from ‘how clever are you?’ to instead asking, ‘how are you clever?’ can have radical effects on the everyday language we use. He will demonstrate how directors convince movie executives to invest large sums of money in a project based on one simple line of information. By showing how we can use strategies like the ‘The Curse of Knowledge’, the ‘Velcro Theory of Memory’ and ‘Curiosity gaps’ we can all adopt simple ideas to make sure that we can lead our teams and colleagues to deliver consistently high performance.