Our Ambassadors

Benson Ferrari is Headmaster of St Michael's School in Llanelli. He has a significant level of experience in designing assessment frameworks for use in schools and is particularly interested in the quality of assessment information that schools provide to parents and other key stakeholders.

Benson is keen to see external assessment better reflect the cognitive diversity found in the population, whilst responding to the changing demands of a modern society, particularly in the workplace. Prior to his current post, Benson was a secondary Deputy Head responsible for curriculum, teaching and assessment, though he has also taught in FE and trained teachers on accredited ITE programmes. As well as being a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors, Benson is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and also the Society for Education and Training.

Alyson Goldstein is a freelance consultant who has been advising awarding bodies on assessment for nearly thirty years, specialising in English examinations, especially for speakers of other languages. She is a member of EALTA (European Association for Language Testing and Assessment) as well as being a Fellow of the CIEA, and has worked with awarding bodies across Europe.

Alyson started working life as a language teacher and took the opportunity, when it arose, to gain commercial experience as a translator and interpreter in the shipping industry and eventually became UK Operations Manager of a Spanish/English shipping line.

Education called her back, however, and involvement in two separate projects (Fullemploy and Advance) found her advising the Department for Education on policy in the 1980s and 1990s. She became increasingly interested in assessment and since 1990 has worked with various awarding organisations as an examiner and item writer for a variety of qualifications, becoming Chief Examiner for City & Guilds’ English for Office Skills, Spoken English for Business and English for Business Communications exams in 2005. In 2011 their IESOL and ISESOL suite of qualifications also came under her remit.

Alyson’s series of textbooks on English for Business were published by Robert Gibson & Sons Glasgow Limited in 2000 and she has contributed to various other publications and produced web-based support materials for students. Alyson is especially interested in the role of IT in assessment and was part of the team that launched City & Guilds’ first venture into online marking in 2011. She has recently overseen the development and production of a range of support materials for an online English test and is currently advising a European awarding body on the development of their suite of English examinations.

After school in London, Michael Nicholas read music at Oxford, where he was Organ Scholar of Jesus College. His first post was at Louth, Lincolnshire, followed by six years at the famous church of St Matthew, Northampton. In 1971, he took up the post of Organist and Master of the Choristers at Norwich Cathedral. For the next twenty-three years, he directed the cathedral choir in eleven foreign tours and many concerts, broadcasts and recordings, in addition to maintaining a high standard at the seven weekly choral services.

He founded the Norwich Festival of Contemporary Church Music in 1981 and commissioned many new pieces. He also conducted the Norwich Philharmonic Chorus, the Triennial Festival Chorus and the Cathedral Chamber Choir and was a part-time Lecturer in Music at the University of East Anglia.

In 1994, he became the first Chief Executive of the Royal College of Organists, for three years leading the process of modernisation of the College's work. He left the College in 1997 in order to extend his work as a performing musician and examiner. East Anglia once again became the focus of his activities when in 1999 he took up the post of Organist and Director of Music at the Civic Church of St Mary-le-Tower, Ipswich.

His solo organ recordings, made on the organ of Norwich Cathedral, were released on the Decca, Vista and Meridian labels and Michael has given recitals in the United States and Canada as well as in many of the Cathedrals and College Chapels of this country. Besides touring abroad with his choirs from Norwich and Ipswich, he has conducted choirs in Australia, Canada, France and the USA. He has also published a number of compositions and arrangements for choir and/or organ.

Now living in Norfolk again, Michael continues to have a busy freelance career as organist, choir director and composer. He is also an experienced music examiner, having worked for the ABRSM since 1978, Edexcel since 1997 and on many occasions for the RCO. He is a member of the CIEA.

CIEA Fellow Dr Jon Hall is a Senior Lecturer in Computing and Communications at the Open University with 20 years’ experience as an academic. As well as being a Fellow of BCS, of IARIA, and a Senior Fellow of the HEA, he is a Chartered Information Technology Professional, Engineer and Scientist. He writes widely on leadership, education and tech, and is an educational strategy consultant. In his spare time, he runs a small sports training company, is the official Quidditch photographer at Leicester University and often feels the loneliness of the long-distance runner.

Research interests: Jon's research sees engineering as a socially situated design problem solving process within which creativity and expertise join to solve real-world problems by satisfying a wide range of stakeholders. On the other hand, it captures design problem solving processes within the first design theoretic logical framework which provides a logical foundation to represent and reason about phenomenological relationships and their ramifications in design processes.
The resulting theory, Problem Oriented Engineering, is recognised as encapsulating transdisciplinary engineering (including software engineering) for our complex, volatile, software-driven world.

Teaching interests: Jon wrote the innovative Master's level Introduction to Information Security Management based around new ideas in educational assessment for working students. He’s served as the External Examiner on the University of York's CyberSecurity MSc and for numerous research degrees.

Impact and engagement: Jon’s teaching portfolio has touched the lives of around 10,000 students and his research is used by many global brands, including Siemens, The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, General Dynamics UK, and BAE Systems. He has chaired the BCS’s Computing Leadership Forum, chairs the IT Livery Company’s Education and Training Committee and is UK Director of Education and Training for EuroCIO. In his Livery Company role, he leads work which includes delivering edutech in schools and colleges.

Michael Taylor is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Glasgow where his work aims to analyse the impact of educational assessment policy on Secondary (age 11-18) school classrooms in Great Britain. He also works as Head of Teaching & Learning in a school in the North West of England and is a trustee for the Chartered College of Teaching.

Michael completed an MSc in Teaching and Learning at the University of Oxford. He received a distinction for his dissertation investigating applications of non-graded formative assessment in the Science classroom. This work finished by beginning to evaluate the impact of gradeless feedback on students from disadvantaged backgrounds. It found evidence to suggest that formative assessment can improve the engagement and meta-cognition of students across a variety of subjects.

Michael’s PhD at the University of Glasgow focuses on the impact of education policy on aspects of social justice in Great Britain. Michael hopes to make a small difference by holding key pieces of policy to account through analysis of the policy aims and the ways in which is likely to bring about change. He is a critical advocate for the use of formative assessment and student agency in the classroom.