Michael Lambert, Global Education Director at Inspired Education Group, on leading across continents and building AI curricula for the future
This podcast episode is sponsored by Inspired Education Group as part of a paid promotion. As with every episode of Heads & Tales, the content remains editorially independent.
In the latest episode of Heads & Tales, Henry Faber sits down with Michael Lambert, Global Education Director of Inspired Education Group, for an in-depth conversation about leading education on a truly global scale.
Mike brings an extraordinary perspective to international education - overseeing a network of 120 schools across six continents that educates over 90,000 students. Before joining Inspired, he spent over a decade as the head of Dubai College, where he led transformative change and demonstrated remarkable foresight in pandemic planning. His journey from school leadership to global education direction offers unique insights into the future of learning at scale.
Now five months into his role at Inspired, Mike combines deep operational experience with strategic vision, tackling everything from AI curriculum development to maintaining educational quality across diverse cultural contexts. His approach balances innovation with educational fundamentals, always keeping student outcomes at the centre of decision-making.
A conversation in a Dubai bar that changed everything
One of the most compelling stories Mike shares reveals his prescient approach to crisis management. In early 2020, during a casual conversation in a Dubai bar with a former colleague who had moved to Hong Kong, Mike received crucial advice that would prove invaluable.
"He said to me, actually, and a, and a fellow head in Dubai, listen, guys, you need to plan for this. It's coming your way. It's massive and it's going to change your life," Mike recalls. "So we were sitting there having a beer and I was thinking, this is surely that's over overstating it. I mean, nothing like this has happened before."
But Mike's response demonstrates his strategic mindset. "So that night after getting home from the pub, I went on to Amazon and found a random book called Strategic Planning in the Age of the Pandemic, which was written by some niche academic and basically spent the next two or three days reading this book."
What followed was extraordinary foresight in action. Mike sat down with his senior leadership team for three and a half weeks, treating pandemic planning as a desktop exercise. "I think the SLT at the time thought I was absolutely crazy, but probably the agenda was a little bit light for us in the school at the time. So it seemed like a worthwhile exercise to go through."
The result? When Dubai schools received two weeks' notice of closure, Dubai College was ready. "We had a completely start to finish documented strategic plan to pivot our school from a bricks and mortar school to an online school at the click of a switch." Mike reflects with justified pride: "I would say we ran the the best COVID provision in the whole of Dubai for that summer term because we'd sort of taken this kind of horizon scanning opportunity."
As Mike puts it simply: "I'm a man with a plan probably."
The UAE's world-leading inspection model
Mike speaks with genuine appreciation about Dubai's educational inspection framework, having experienced it firsthand during his tenure at Dubai College. Initially challenging, the system ultimately earned his respect for its effectiveness in driving educational excellence.
"When I first arrived, I was thinking, crikey, this is a high pressure, high accountability environment with the annual inspection that existed within the Dubai education landscape," Mike explains. The stakes were high - "if you're a for profit school... the ability to put up your school fees in line with inflation was entirely linked to the inspection rating that you got."
However, his perspective evolved dramatically over time. "By the time I left, paradoxically, maybe I was just well trained or well conditioned to this. I actually thought, you know what, this is an outstanding system."
Mike's analysis of the UAE's achievement is particularly insightful: "Dubai is, is a young emirate. The UAE is, is, is a young country... to create an entire education system with some of the world's best schools and effectively, you know, probably 15 years is, is when most of the schools sprung up."
His conclusion is striking: "How on earth do you create a nascent education system into one of the world's best education systems in the world? And to do that, you set up very, very robust frameworks and you hold schools to account for those frameworks on an annual basis."
Building AI curricula for 90,000 students across 26 jurisdictions
Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of Mike's current role is developing comprehensive AI literacy curricula for Inspired's vast network. The challenge is immense, as Mike explains: "How do we integrate an AI literacy curriculum across 120 schools and 26 different jurisdictions in a way that's sympathetic to where these schools were operating the curriculum that they operate with."
The complexity extends beyond curriculum design to parental expectations and cultural contexts. "Parental expectations and parental appetites for technology, which are many in varied," Mike notes, referencing the phone-free childhood movement and concerns about screen time.
Despite these challenges, Mike sees enormous potential in AI for education: "The potential to have your own personal and private tutor as a student. The opportunity as supposed to be coached as a teacher by uploading lessons and having those lessons paused against a teaching and learning framework and be given direct feedback as as a teacher without having to draw upon senior leadership time."
The solution requires sophisticated balance: "At the moment what we're working on is, OK, we've got device use and we've also got device literacy and device understanding. So how can we roll out, as I say, an AI literacy program for 120 schools, which is age and stage appropriate and contextually specific, no small task."
Inspired's DNA: The three pillars of excellence
Mike articulates Inspired's educational philosophy with clarity, breaking it down into three fundamental pillars that define the group's identity across all its schools.
"The first of those pillars is unashamedly rigorous academics in school. So a great knowledge and skills, rich curriculum for all students, delivered to the highest possible level," Mike explains.
The second pillar focuses on physical development: "There's a huge commitment to sport, including sport within school. So competitive sport in a kind of a house structure as we would understand it with, with within the UK, but also into school sport to allow students at the sort of elite level to compete."
The third pillar encompasses creativity: "The third pillar is all around creative and performing arts. So drama, art, dance, music."
Mike emphasises the integrated nature of this approach: "So it's not a, a, a ruthlessly academic curriculum. It's a broad and balanced curriculum with a, with a strong focus on academics, which probably is the sort of first among equals of those sorts of three pillars."
Technology integration represents a fourth dimension: "Nadeem, who is our founder and chairman and CEO... he's always been very keen on ensuring that we integrate technology, knowing that we are always evolving in that front and, and better to expose our children to this kind of technology judiciously so they can understand how to use it rather than to keep them away from it."
Mike's controversial opinion: The case for explicit instruction
When asked for an unpopular opinion, Mike doesn't hesitate to dive into pedagogical debate, defending explicit instruction over inquiry-based learning approaches.
"There are two, two schools of thought really when it comes to education," Mike explains. "You either kind of subscribe to an inquiry based approach. So light on instruction exploration for students, let them discover the outcomes to a question that they've been posed themselves. Or there is a school of thought that says, look, explicit instruction is the right way to go in the classroom."
His position is clear: "If you actually want the child to learn something, well then teach them explicitly. So rather than setting an inquiry based question and saying, what do you think the answer to this is? Giving students 50 minutes to go off and explore what that solution might be and they could come back with all number of potential outcomes. If you actually want them to know what the outcome is, we'll just tell them what the outcome is."
Mike acknowledges the counterintuitive nature of his stance: "Even though intuitively we like to think about concept LED learning, interdisciplinarity, inquiry based learning, it feels progressive. If it feels right, it feels more like what we might be doing in our workplace."
However, he argues for a developmental approach: "Ultimately school is about laying those strong knowledge, skills and understanding foundations, which then allows students to be creative with that fundamental knowledge when they get to the point of the workplace. But a school isn't a workplace. A school is a school. A workplace is a workplace and therefore it requires 2 completely different approaches."
Navigating the VAT debate and market resilience
Mike addresses the challenges facing UK independent education with characteristic analytical clarity. While acknowledging uncertainty about the long-term impact of recent policy changes, he remains confident about premium providers' resilience.
"This this is going to take at least 12 to 36 months to play out," Mike predicts, noting the complexity of assessing immediate impacts versus longer-term trends.
For Inspired specifically, Mike sees opportunity within challenge: "What Inspired wants to do is to communicate the fact that what we are offering is, is a super premium product that is, that is among, if not the very best in the market. And as a consequence, probably it won't be Inspired schools that will, that will suffer in the long run."
His analysis suggests market consolidation may benefit high-quality providers: "I think other schools will perhaps fall back by the wayside 1st and as a consequence, those parents who then make a choice of OK, we're now going to go into the state system or we're going to remain in in, in the private system. Then those those students will likely come across to groups like inspired."
The secret to career progression in education
Mike's career advice draws from his own formative experience, crediting Jimmy Presley, his former head of classics at RGS Guildford, with crucial early guidance.
"He was trying to give give me some career advice very early on. So I don't know what how ambitious you are, Mike, or what you want to do. My only piece of advice to you would be to make sure that every year you're doing something extra new or different to what you did last year. A for your own sanity, but also for your career development."
Mike enthusiastically adopted this philosophy: "I really kind of took that to mind. So, you know, thinking about careers and progression and how do you end up where you end up? I always thought, well, what project or working party or committee or as I got you sort of more experienced, which Board of Governors, which HMC subcommittee was I on this year that I wasn't on last year?"
The practical benefit, Mike explains, is sustainable growth: "Your your experience gets wider and you you get to automate quite a lot of what you know after a year. So you can afford to take on a little bit more. Doesn't mean you're any busier because actually the experience you've got from the previous year then becomes habitual to you."
His summary advice is elegantly simple: "Do something new, extra or different every year in your teaching career for your sanity and for your career progression."
Mike's ambitious two-year plan
Mike's immediate priority demonstrates his commitment to personal leadership and relationship-building across Inspired's vast network. His goal is both ambitious and deeply personal.
"If I can get around all 120 schools during the course of 24 months, that would be that would be a success story for me. Just so that you, you know, I've met every single one of the head teachers," Mike explains.
While he began with phone calls to every head, Mike recognises the irreplaceable value of face-to-face connection: "That was my sort of first mission back in January was to make a phone call to all the heads and say hello, I'm Mike Lambert, you know, this is what I'm thinking. How can I help and support, but an online call is never the same as as as as walking the halls with somebody."
His success metric is beautifully simple: "If I can walk the corridor of 120 schools in 24 months, that will be a success and the next step for me."
A vision for global education
Mike's approach to educational leadership offers valuable insights for the sector's future. His emphasis on strategic planning, his defence of explicit instruction, and his commitment to personal relationship-building at scale provide a roadmap for educational organisations navigating an increasingly complex world.
His combination of strategic vision and operational experience, demonstrated through his COVID response at Dubai College and his current work across Inspired's network, shows how educational leaders can balance innovation with proven educational principles. In an era when education faces unprecedented challenges and opportunities, Mike's leadership philosophy offers both inspiration and practical guidance for building sustainable excellence at any scale.
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About Inspired Education Group
Inspired Education Group is a leading global premium schools group operating 120 schools across six continents, educating over 90,000 students. The group combines rigorous academics with elite sport and performing arts programmes while embracing technological innovation. With schools in Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa, Inspired maintains consistently high standards while respecting local cultures and educational traditions.