Michael Barber

Following his time leading the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, Barber served as partner and head of McKinsey's Global Education Practice. While at McKinsey, Barber co-authored two major education reports: How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better (2010) and How the world’s best-performing schools come out on top (2007).

Barber has worked for over 20 years in education and government reform and improvement. During that time, he has advised governments in over 60 countries on issues of public policy and delivery. He was the founder and first head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit under Prime Minister Tony Blair, and later served as Chief Education Advisor at Pearson, and as a partner at McKinsey, where he was head of the global education practice. He currently serves as Co-Chair of Boston Consulting Group's not-for-profit foundation, Centre for Public Impact;; he has been a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and he was recently appointed as Chair of the Office for Students (OfS) – the proposed new regulator for Higher Education in the UK. He recently published How to Run a Government: So that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t go Crazy.

Barber also served as co-chair of the Pakistan Education Taskforce, as DFID Special Representative on Education for Pakistan. He has now made more than fifty visits to Pakistan, where he continues to serve as an advisor on system reform to the Chief Minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif. This work led to the development of the 'Punjab Roadmap, with ambitious goals to increase the quality of education offered at all 60,000 schools in the Punjab. The Good News from Pakistan, published in 2013 with Reform, summarises the change achieved between August 2011 and January 2013. These include:

In March 2013, Barber published An Avalanche is Coming with Katelyn Donnelly and Saad Rizvi about the upcoming revolution in global higher education. They described the 'unbundling' of higher education and called on university leaders to change

Barber chaired the Pearson Affordable Learning Fund. Announced in July 2012, The Pearson Affordable Learning Fund (PALF) is a venture fund with $65M of capital that invests in private schools, education technology, and scalable services to meet the demand for affordable education in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. PALF seeks investments with market returns while demonstrating outsized learning outcomes. In 2016, PALF had 10 portfolio companies across 6 countries, averaging 140% revenue growth in that year.

In August 2012, Barber published Oceans of Innovation with Katelyn Donnelly and Saad Rizvi about the rise of Pacific Asia and the implications for global leadership and education. They laid out the need for whole system revolutions in education, which combine whole system reform and systemic innovation.

In November 2012, Barber launched The Learning Curve. The Learning Curve was commissioned by Pearson from the Economist Intelligence Unit to work with some of the world's leading education experts to review, research, and interview innovators from every continent about how best to achieve better learning outcomes.

During this time, Barber continued to work on management in the public sector, and published Deliverology 101 in 2011 to serve as a comprehensive guide to system reform and delivery. Governments and large public organisations (from the Louisiana school system to the Malaysian government) adopted elements of the 'deliverology' approach. Additionally, a number of international organizations including the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, DFID, and the IMF sought his advice and guidance.

From September 2011 to March 2017, Barber was Chief Education Advisor at Pearson. In this role, he led the company's worldwide research and partnership on education policy, and learning methods, advised on and supported the innovation and development of new products and services, and led Pearson's strategy for education in the poorest sectors of the world, particularly in fast-growing developing economies.

In the summer of 2010, Barber teamed with leaders from the Education Trust and Achieve to found the U.S. Education Delivery Institute. Between 2010 and 2016, this Institute worked with leaders of K-12 and higher education systems around the United States to adapt the delivery concept pioneered by Barber in the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit to drive American education reform efforts.

During Blair's second term, from 2001 to 2005, Barber served as the Chief Adviser on Delivery, reporting directly to Prime Minister Tony Blair. As head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit (PMDU), he was responsible for working with government agencies to ensure successful implementation of the Prime Minister's priority programs, including those in health, education, transport, policing, the criminal justice system, and asylum/immigration. He wrote a book about his experience in the PMDU. Instruction to Deliver: Fighting to Reform Britain’s Public Services (Methuen 2008), It was described by the Financial Times as "one of the best books about British Government for many years".

Barber served as Chief Adviser to the Secretary of State for Education on School Standards during the first term of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, from 1997 to 2001.

Barber worked in the education department of the National Union of Teachers. As a member of the Labour Party, he was elected to the council of the London Borough of Hackney, becoming chair of the education committee. In 1987 he contested for Labour the seat of Henley-on-Thames, then held by Michael Heseltine.

Sir Michael Blaydon Barber (born 24 November 1955) is a British educationist and founder and chairman of Delivery Associates, an advisory firm focussed on working with governments and other organisations to help them deliver improved outcomes for citizens. He is a global expert on implementation of large-scale system change, a leading authority on education systems and education reform, and was knighted in 2005 for his contributions to improving government.