Introducing the Education publishing editorial board

This year, Jo Haywood and Harry Lord took over as chairs of our Education publishing editorial board. They bring complementary experience and skills to the role, reflecting the breadth of perspectives of our board.

Former RSC scholar Harry Lord teaches chemistry at Haslingden High School and Sixth Form in the north-west of England. Harry first joined the board as an early career teacher in 2017. Now he is head of year. Want to know more about Harry? Read our interview with him in our Meet the … series.

Jo Haywood leads the chemistry PGCE course in the faculty of education at the University of Cambridge. Jo also works as director of studies and supervisor for chemistry and science admissions tutor at Homerton College, Cambridge, as well as teaching science to 11–19 learners. Prior to her current roles, Jo was a head of chemistry, head of science and an IB coordinator.

Different perspectives

Our editorial board is all about different perspectives. We have representatives from all areas of the teaching profession that our Education in Chemistry (EiC) and teaching resources publishing programme supports. This includes teachers from each nation of the UK, those at different stages of their teaching careers, teachers with other subject specialisms and those with links to higher and vocational education. We also have a technical specialist member, Mike Hughes, on the board and someone from the publishing industry.

We had a lively discussion resulting in valuable feedback, involving diagrams, lots of sticky notes and flip charts scrawled with marker pens

We value the diverse viewpoints and insights board members bring to our meetings, where they help us develop and refine projects. Together we discuss initial, broad ideas as well as getting into the details of specific articles and teaching resources. Without their input, our resources and articles would not be so valuable to teachers.

For example, at the meeting in November 2024 the board members did a think-pair-share activity to suggest ideas for a new professional development content stream in EiC and a planning activity to provide teaching insight as we consider developing new skills resources. As always, we had a lively discussion resulting in valuable feedback, involving diagrams, lots of sticky notes and flip charts scrawled with marker pens.

These early consultations help us to hone our ideas and questions before we reach out to other groups of teachers for more input and therefore focus our research.

The board meets three times a year, once per term. The spring and summer term meetings take place online, but the autumn term meeting is an opportunity to get together in person and have a more in-depth discussion of our publishing progress and plans at the RSC’s London office, Burlington House.