ABOUT US

Illumine uses only the highest quality professionals working for you. Illumine’s consultants are all hand-picked, including ex-HMIs and highly experienced Registered / Lead Inspectors who are passionate about supporting school improvement and bring to each assignment extensive experience and knowledge. Our consultants include a range of specialists in early years, primary, secondary and special educational needs settings, whose professional skills are combined with empathy and an understanding of the current challenges that schools face. Consultants are carefully matched to each school and assignment when allocating tasks, depending on their phase, aspect and subject expertise.

The director of Illumine, Margaret Julia Goodchild, has 12 years’ experience of Section 10 inspections as a Registered Inspector and has led over 90 inspections of secondary, primary and special schools and pupil referral units. She now leads Section 5 inspections for two Regional Inspection Providers and is, therefore, on the inside of the new inspection system. She has extensive experience of supporting and advising schools and local education authorities as a consultant, focusing particularly on whole-school improvement, leadership and management, self-evaluation and inclusion. She is an External Advisor for the Performance Management of Headteachers, has been a consultant to the Technology Colleges Trust and an Advanced Skills Teacher Assessor. Previously a Senior Lecturer in Education at Middlesex Polytechnic and member of an LEA advisory service, she has wide teaching experience, spanning work in two different types of special schools, teaching in primary and secondary schools and lecturing in further education. Her work is founded on a thorough academic basis, as well as on practical experience: she has a first class honours degree, a masters degree, a postgraduate certificate of education, a diploma in counselling and an advanced diploma in special educational needs. She was the OFSTED commissioned author of ‘Inspecting Special Educational Needs’ in the series Inspecting Subjects 11 – 16.

Having received high acclaim from many schools for her perceptive and rigorous, yet caring and understanding, style of inspection and consultancy, she founded Illumine with the intention of using her wealth of experience to help schools in coping with the new inspection system and to provide focused support for managers who wish to transform their schools by realising any unfulfilled potential within individuals and in the organisation as a whole. She has particular experience – from teaching, advisory work and inspection - of schools in challenging circumstances and with ethnically diverse intakes.