Many, many thanks to all of you who helped us to celebrate the launch of Breslin Public Policy last night - really, really appreciated and a fantastic evening with lots of bustling and productive conversation. It was great to bring so many people together, drawn from across the fields of policy and practice. Connecting these too often separate realms is key to everything we do.
If you had intended to join us but were unable to do so on the evening, or if you simply couldn't make the date, do stay in touch - we hope to see you at our next event, for which you will receive an invitation shortly.
I am also pleased to confirm that, following our free charity raffle, we will be making donations of £100 to Medicins Sans Frontières, School Home Support and Age UK. We're proud to give this sum to each of these great causes, our own attempt to do Responsible Business and demonstrate Corporate Responsibility.
For those of you who were not there, the charities were chosen by our winners: Francis Sealey of GlobalNet 21, Anne McHardy of McHardy Farrell Media and Carly Mason of V. We will be making the donations this week.
The good news for the three winners is that they also get a voucher for a meal for two and a bottle of wine at Charterhouse Bar, kindly donated by Charterhouse. We will be in touch with the winners shortly to confirm how to claim your voucher.
Many thanks to Phil, Janice, Ed and the team at Charterhouse for a great evening - a lovely venue and already established as the home of one of our favourite networks, Convergence.
Thanks, also, to Richard O'Sullivan and Phil Ventre at Callisto for developing our branding and our website concept and design, to Helen Wiles at Helen Wiles Zine for building the website and to Grace Pluckrose-Oliver for making our first short film, which you can view on the site: http://www.breslinpublicpolicy.com/.
On the site you will find details about the various prjects that we are currently working on, or have previously worked on. Early partners include The Bridge Group, V, CCE England, East Sussex County Council, the Diana Award, Navigation Learning, Character Scotland, the British Olympic Foundation and the British Paralympic Association; we are grateful to each of you for your support and for inviting us to work with you.
Our next event, which we are staging in partnership with Global Net 21, is the launch of our signature education project, Transform Education. This will take place at Portcullis House, part of the Palace of Westminster on the evening of Tuesday 13th March.
This is the first of three meetings in which we will explore the challenges facing us as we seek to build education systems and develop approaches to learning that meet our needs in the first part of the twenty-first century. The focus of the first meeting will be on issues of curriculum and achievement in the school sector.
We are thrilled to confirm Stephen Twigg MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Professor Geoff Whitty CBE of the University of Bath's School of Management (and formerly Director at the University of London's Institute of Education) and Maggie Atkinson, The Children's Commissioner for England, as our speakers. You can get a sense of what we will be discussing by listening to the podcast on our site, produced by Francis Sealey at GlobalNet 21.
In the meantime, thank you again for celebrating with us last night or for helping us to get to this point in some other way. Your support has been greatly appreciated.
Now the work begins.
