An inspirational lifelong learning journey. Mary Curnock Cook, CBE: chair of Emerge’s HE network
Profile: Mary Curnock Cook chair of Emerge’s Higher Education Network
Mary Curnock Cook, CBE, convenes Emerge Education’s network to further edtech innovation in Higher Education (HE) and chairs its Higher Education Edtech Board with VCs, PVCs, and COOs as its members hailing from 60+ UK, EU and US HE institutions. An inspiring force in education, Curnock Cook was UCAS’ transformative CEO until 2017, has held leadership positions in both the public and private sectors and is on the board of numerous pioneering educational and edtech organisations.
However, Curnock Cook’s educational path was anything but straightforward, from leaving school at 16 to wait until her 40s to go to university. It’s led to a passion for understanding pathways through education, qualifications and into careers, never more so than in her role as chair of Pearson’s UK qualifications business, Pearson Education Ltd.
Find out more about ‘education obsessive’ and inveterate networker Mary Curnock Cook in this Emerge Education profile.
It’s always been about the data for Mary Curnock Cook. She recently came across a stack of little notebooks she’d written when she was about six years old and “all of them were written in code. I was always thinking about relationships between numbers and relating numbers to situations,” she remembers with a smile.
It’s a thread that has run through her career from entering secretarial college at 16 and discovering she was brilliant at shorthand to her current interest in how edtech startups can use data to tackle some of the most pressing issues in education, not least entrenched underperformance by some groups, such as white, working-class males.
However, it was as CEO at UCAS between 2010 and 2017 that Curnock Cook was first able to stretch her wings when it came to the potential and possibilities of data.
Transforming UCAS
“It was a dream job,” she says. “I was like a kid in a sweet shop with all the education data. When I arrived at UCAS we didn’t have the capability to use that data and pull the insights out, so I built up a really good data science team, which made all the difference.”
During her seven-year stint at UCAS, she transformed the organisation from one that printed and packed up pallet loads of paper application forms to send out to universities — and had a website that regularly crashed on all-important results day — to an early adopter of the cloud and a nationally trusted data source around university admissions.
What marked Curnock Cook’s changes at UCAS was the speed and granularity of the insights the organisation became able to produce. Whereas most official HE statistics would typically be released a year or even two years after admissions had taken place, under Curnock Cook UCAS began publishing a full analysis of HE admissions just two weeks after the mid-January application deadline, enabling universities to plan better for the next cycle.
“I was there when the fees went up in 2012, and then as the student number cap ended in subsequent years, and I’d have the universities minister on the phone asking me, ‘Mary, what’s going on?’ Being able to give a meaningful answer was very empowering.
“But best of all was getting real insights into who does and doesn’t go to university, what qualifications they do or don’t have, and what grades. Who’s left out in all of this?”
She remains a passionate champion for student interests, particularly disadvantaged students, recently chairing the UPP Foundation Student Futures Commission. Working closely with students and students’ unions, the Commission has been looking at how universities can best support students post-pandemic, especially given the low levels of confidence many students feel after school and campus closures, cancelled exams and months of isolation.
A big cog in a small machine
Fundamental to Curnock Cook’s success at UCAS, alongside the digital transformation, was changing the culture to make it more customer focused. She drew on her background in business, including in startups, though her early career had given little indication of the path she was to take.
Brought up on a farm in Lincolnshire and attending a Catholic convent school for girls, she remarks that “I don’t think anybody had ever really talked to me about what my future career would be. I’m part of the generation when parents just expected their daughters to get married.”
She went straight into work at 17, and it was her second job, with an Irish biotech startup based in London, in 1980 that started to take her places.
“My job was marketing executive/secretary, which I thought was terribly exciting. I can remember running out to buy a book about marketing because I had no idea what it was,” she recollects. “Very soon I was doing business development in the US, Europe and the Far East; I was on and off a plane all the time. I also spent a year living in the US when I set up a subsidiary there.” By the time she left, eight years later, she was a director.
“When you work in a startup, you’re a big cog in a small machine, and you learn a lot, quickly, and especially from your mistakes when you’re doing everything from negotiating a distribution agreement with a multinational company to agreeing on a lease on a new office space,” she explains.
Getting the education bug
Curnock Cook then joined a quango promoting British food as marketing director, where she got a feel for how government does business (and had three children along the way).
Six years later she took on her first chief executive role in a small professional body for the licensed retail industry, BII. Over seven years she grew the organisation from nine staff to 50 and a huge membership. Oh, and she also picked up an OBE recognising her work in training within the tourism and hospitality industry (upgraded to CBE for services to further and higher education in 2020).
This was the job where Curnock Cook really “got the education bug”. The organisation had its own awarding body, developing qualifications for the licensed retail sector. She recalls that “Sometimes I’d be giving out qualification certificates and seeing a middle-aged man who had left school at 14 or 15 with no qualifications with a tear in his eye because it was the first time anybody had ever validated his professionalism: that’s what got me.”
By now in her 40s, she entered HE herself for the first time, swiftly did the prestigious one-year Sloan Master’s at London Business School on the basis that any serious education job would require a degree, and took on a role as number two at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, before moving to UCAS.
New horizons
Today, working across a range of education-related projects, she’s excited by the possibilities opened up by edtech and new models of higher education, especially challenger institutions that provide new and different competition for the traditional sector.
She namechecks the Dyson Institute, of which she is a chair, with its acclaimed apprenticeship model, as well as Hereford’s New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE) and TEDI London, the engineering and design institute stemming from a collaboration with King’s College London, Arizona State University and UNSW Sydney.
She is also on the board of the London Interdisciplinary School, which educates through a problem-solving approach to tackling social and global challenges — from obesity to climate change — taking students out of the traditional siloed system. “It’s just such an innovative model, pushing the boundaries way beyond traditional higher education. I can’t wait to see how it all pans out,” enthuses Curnock Cook.
She doesn’t limit herself to higher education, either — she has recently become chair of the strategic advisory board of Skills Imperative 2035, a five-year strategic research programme to identify the essential employment skills people will need for work by 2035.
It all helps feed her vast knowledge of education policy and developments; she is punctilious about keeping up with reading and engaging in the debate, as her Twitter feed amply shows.
It also helps that Curnock Cook is a very natural networker, seeing it as a serious skill and taking a generous approach to linking people and ideas. She is constantly engaging with hopeful entrepreneurs who contact her on LinkedIn and drawing people into her network where she thinks she can help them.
Emerge Higher Education Edtech board — a network for those serious about edtech
In her role as chair of Emerge Education’s HE Network, Curnock Cook is at the heart of many cutting-edge developments within edtech. Set up as a “curated and safe space to talk about serious edtech”, the network brings together people in senior roles in HE to discuss their challenges and possible solutions and hear from selected startups that have been quality filtered by Emerge.
“I was completely bowled over by how much people in senior roles in HE wanted to get into a serious conversation with their peers about edtech,” says Curnock Cook. “These leaders have a mile-long queue of edtech hopefuls proposing their latest startup idea, and there’s a real desire — and need — for some filtering of that. The network also provides a space for senior people who don’t come from a technical background themselves to be able to talk about technology solutions in a very straightforward ‘what’s it going to do for me’ way, and that’s valuable.”
The HE edtech board, in partnership with Jisc, convenes once a term for a fast-paced session packed with insight and useful, shareable information such as market maps, and is seen by HE leaders as relevant, fresh and value-packed. Regular research deep dives result in well-respected papers looking at how edtech can enhance different aspects of the university experience, from assessment to employer-university collaboration.
As for Emerge itself, “I love the way that they come from a place of wanting to democratise education, and they’ve developed a very clear thesis-driven process that drives what they do. They’re a close, smart team passionate about education and entrepreneurship — and the fund’s been really successful to date, which is the proof of the pudding. It means a lot to me that they are first-cheque investors — where others fear to tread, they go boldly due to the level of edtech market insight they possess. I'm just glad the HE board we run together does its part in keeping their knowledge of sector trends at the cutting to edge and adding real value to their portfolio,” concludes Curnock Cook.
