Matthew sees every new collaboration as the beginning of a relationship, and he endeavours to tailor his work to the specific needs of each and every client, informed by and catering for the school’s unique context and community. Indeed, many of his clients choose to work with him, face-to-face and remotely, over a number of years.
He is equally comfortable working with leaders and educators, governors and parents, and children and young people. Together they till the soil of the school's culture and climate, embracing complexity and nurturing nuance, such that positive impact subsequently emerges. In this way, his work with schools often explores:
- The 'why' of data and assessment, as a moral choice, a revolutionary act and an instrument of kindness
- Tesselated constellations of data and assessment, and visualising the student's, and the school's, data story
- An epistemological and holistic approach to wellbeing, and an exploration of the wellbeing ecosystem
- A community-wide interrogation of wellbeing equity, and what he calls 'universal design for wellbeing'
These are just some of the questions that are coming up at the moment in his conversations with schools:
- Do our epistemological approaches chime with the ontologies identified in our school’s DNA?
- Is there any dissonance between who we are, who we say we are, and who we want to be?
- Why do we, our staff and our students still feel such need to mask who we really are?
- Is there consensus and clarity about the words we use when talking about strategy, policy and practice?
- Are we aware of the ‘wellbeing footprint’ of what we decide, do and say?
- What do data and assessment feel like to each member of our school community?
- What are the pitfalls of data and assessment and do we observe these health warnings?
- Do we seek the stories within our data constellations, or does our data remain a cold, reductive map?
- Are we digging into the complex soil of our school’s ecology, or mistaking it for a predictable, ordered map?
- What and where are our ‘sanctuary spaces’, and how can we intentionally and collaboratively design for wellbeing equity?
Matthew is also a prolific and highly regarded keynote speaker, as well as being an experienced, leadership coach, accredited by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).
In addition, and drawing on the intersectional soup of his own family - in particular his own lived experience of physical disability, and the gender journeys of his two, adult, trans children - Matthew is frequently asked to work in this space, both as a speaker and as a consultant and trainer.