Wendy Berliner

Biography

Wendy is an award-winning education journalist who has just written her first book - Great Minds and How to Grow Them - in collaboration with Professor Deborah Eyre. The book is an evidence based parents’ guide to high performance in children and became an Amazon best seller on the day it was published by Routledge in July 2017.
An education specialist for most of her life, Wendy has been notably education correspondent of the Pulitzer prize-winning Guardian newspaper in London, worked as a news editor there and written news, features and editorials. She holds an award for Outstanding Educational Journalism from the Edexcel Achievement in Education Awards.
Most recently she was head of editorial for the Guardian’s multi-award winning online professional networks. The team won the prestigious Content Team of the Year Award in the 2016 British Media Awards.
She’s also worked at the Independent newspaper in London where she introduced and edited a weekly education supplement and a raft of regular magazines for would-be higher education students, parents and mature students.
Starting out initially as a reporter working in the English Midlands, she worked as a reporter on the Walsall Observer and later the Birmingham Post; her connection with education journalism began when she was appointed the paper’s education correspondent. She then went to London to be a reporter on the Times Educational Supplement, the teachers’ newspaper, which she later returned to edit.
Her only non-journalistic role was in Dubai where she was a director for GEMS Education, the world’s largest group of international schools. There she got company backing to introduce a highly successful parental engagement programme in the company’s schools around the world, designed to help parents support their children to be successful at school by the things they did at home and with the school.
Currently, she is Joint Chief Executive Officer of the Education Media Centre in London, a charity which works to improve public understanding of education research.
In her private life she is a mother and has been chair of a Parent Teacher Association, a chair of school governors, and a governor of several other schools. She was on a strategic group which took an old and established boys’ school co-ed. She is a trustee of the Inspiring Futures Foundation, a careers charity, which is currently developing an awards scheme for disadvantaged youngsters.

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Education, parenting.

Personal Interests

Education - particularly the long tail of school under achievement in the UK - often dominated by the disadvantaged. Seeking out high quality evidence based research and practice designed eventually to lead to the eradication of under achievement among all young people at school.
Parenting - particularly  looking for research and practice which will help all parents support their children to develop into independent young adults who can flourish emotionally, and who succeed in education and in life.

Books

Articles

News