Special series: Lessons in Leadership

In this special 6 part series, Justin Russell meets with inspirational leaders from the UK public sector to find out how you thrive and survive at the top. In this fifth episode, Justin meets Jo Dibb, the headteacher whose school inspired Michelle Obama. 

In 2009, just two months after she had become first lady, Michelle Obama paid a visit to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school – a girls comprehensive in North London. It was to have a profound effect on her. Writing about the visit nearly 10 years later, she reflected on the way the girls she met there had touched her heart and about the sense of purpose that visit had given her – to devote herself to girls education and life chances. “The energy I felt thrumming in that school” she said “had nothing to do with obstacles. It was the power of nine hundred girls striving”.

Jo Dibb is the head teacher who greeted Michelle Obama that day and whose leadership inspired those nine hundred girls.  A head teacher for twenty years and until 2021 the executive head of the Islington Futures Federation, she has been recognised by the Evening Standard as one of London’s most influential people and in 2020 won a Kindness in Leadership award.

Justin Russell is Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Probation. He’s spent his life working and learning from inspirational leaders who have done all of these things and more. In this special series for Bridges to the Future, he’ll be speaking to just some of those who have survived and thrived at the top to find out how they did it and what they can teach you.

A Tempo & Talker production for the RSA.