Access Team

The Inspire Programme Steering Committee is comprised of St John’s College Fellows, headteachers from schools across London and Oxford and education professionals. You can meet the members of the committee below.

Senior College Representatives

Professor Lady Sue Black DBE OBE FRSE FBA FRAI FRSB ChFA, Baroness Black of Strome

The President, St John's College

Professor Black is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists and has most recently been the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University, tasked with raising the University’s profile locally, regionally and nationally whilst championing the economic growth and regeneration of North West England.

Since graduating from the University of Aberdeen in human anatomy and forensic anthropology, Professor Black has had a varied and distinguished academic career, lecturing in Anatomy at St Thomas’ Hospital London and working as a consultant in forensic anthropology for both the Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office, undertaking forensic investigations in Iraq, Sierra Leone and Grenada. She was the lead forensic anthropologist during the international war crimes investigations in Kosovo. From 2003 to 2018 she was Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at Dundee University.

Professor Black has written widely and has made regular media appearances, including on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs and The Life Scientific. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to Higher Education and Forensic Science and in 2021 entered the House of Lords as a crossbencher peer as Baroness Black of Strome. Professor Black is also the 65th President of the Royal Anthropological Institute and she is the lifetime Professor of Anatomy for the Royal Scottish Academy.

Dr Sandra Campbell

Fellow for Access & Outreach and Tutor in Physiology

Sandra is the Fellow for Access and Admissions for St John’s, directing an extensive range of outreach projects including the pre- and post-GCSE Inspire Programme. She leads our team of 5 access and admissions staff, all of whom are passionate about making a difference for disadvantaged pupils. She is also involved in other aspects of College life, including teaching, welfare, discipline, presidential collections, various committees and alumni interactions. Sandra has worked in higher education for the last 25 years. She has been a tutor in Physiology at Oxford for the past 13 years, teaching within the Medicine, Biomedical Sciences and Experimental Psychology courses for both the College and the University. Outside her teaching interests, she manages a team facilitating the development of laboratory imaging biomarkers for tumour detection and monitoring for use in patients.

Denise Cripps

Director of Communications and Engagement

Denise is Director of Communications and Engagement, working on a wide range of projects including strategy and governance as well as communications and engagement. She has a long-standing interest in education having worked in educational publishing for twenty-five years for Oxford University Press and Scholastic UK in editorial and senior management roles. She was also a local primary school governor for eight years and worked with Professor Maggie Snowling, previous President of St John's, on interventions looking at children’s language and learning difficulties and how best to ameliorate them. Denise was part of the team that published the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (OUP, 2018) and the Nuffield Nursery Language Programme (2019).

Professor Kate Nation

Tutorial Fellow in Psychology and Provost for Academic Affairs

As Tutor for Psychology, I am responsible for making the arrangements for the Experimental Psychology (EP) and Psychology, Philosophy & Linguistics (PPL) students at St. John’s. I provide undergraduate tutorials across all three years, covering a range of topics in psychology.  I also contribute to the Psychology for Medicine course. I’m College Advisor to a number of graduate students in College who are researching a wide variety of topics in psychology and neuroscience.  In the department, I give a 2nd year lecture course on Developmental Psychology and a 3rd year advanced course on Reading and Language: Development and Disorder.  I supervise postgraduate students working in the field of psycholinguistics (the psychology of language), especially written language.

I am based in the Department of Experimental Psychology.  Broadly, my research is concerned with the psychology of language, especially reading and its development.  I am interested in how children learn to read words and comprehend text, and more generally, the relationship between spoken language and written language. A key aim at present to specify some of the mechanisms involved in the transition from novice to expert. We also study language processing in skilled adults, addressing the issue of how skilled behaviour emerges via language learning experience. Alongside my research on typical development, I study language and cognitive processes in children with developmental disorders that impact on language and literacy development, including language impairment, autism and dyslexia.

Professor Patrick Hayes

Tutorial Fellow in English

Professor Patrick Hayes is a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, where he teaches English Literature from the romantic period to the present day. His main research interest is in how we might best think about the value of literature in relation to modern ethical and political concerns. So far he have tended to focus on writing in English from beyond the British Isles, exploring the ways in which ideas and traditions move across borders and through time. He has recently completed a historical account of the diverse kinds of writing which have helped to define modern identity—including everything from autobiographies and diaries to psychoanalytic case studies, testimonies, philosophical theories about selfhood, lyric poems, blogs, and social media websites. It covers the period from 1945 to the present day, and forms the concluding volume of the new Oxford History of Life-Writing. His current work is on debates about the nature and value of aesthetic education from the late eighteenth-century right up to the present.

Kerry Jenkins

Finance Bursar

Kerry is responsible for supporting the Governing Body of St John’s in its duties in managing the financial resources of the college. She also manages the finance bursary team who look after the day to day finance operations. She is an Associate Chartered Management Accountant and a Charted Public Finance Accountant with over 25 years of experience.

Laurence Raran

JCR Access Officer

Hello, I am Laurence - I am the JCR Access Officer for St. John's College! As JCR Access Officer, I am committed to maintaining and developing the link between the undergraduate student body and the St. John's Access Team. I aim to increase student participation in access through increasing awareness and interest in the student body for access initiatives and programmes, particularly for Summer Schools and Open Days. I am incredibly passionate about access, having previously been VP in Projects for the Oxford SU's Target Schools scheme and hope to continue to develop the relationship between the undergraduates and access! 

I am presently a student at St. John's College. I am in my third year studying a BA in Philosophy and Theology! I look forward to working with the Inspire Steering Committee and the Access Team to supporting access in the college and in the wider university community.

Professor Stefan Kiefer

Tutorial Fellow in Computer Science

Stefan has been the Tutorial Fellow in Computer Science at St John’s College since 2017 and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford since 2023. His main area of interest is computer-aided verification and the analysis of probabilistic systems. He completed his PhD at the Technical University of Munich in 2009.

External Advisors

Katherine Ryan, MBE

Former Head Teacher, Matthew Arnold School, Oxford and CEO Acer Trust

Katherine brings a lifelong commitment to improving education and a particular interest in success and progression for learners of all ages and backgrounds. She has been Headteacher of Matthew Arnold School since 2006 and has focused on ensuring that all learners are able to succeed and to progress to positive destinations when they leave school. As Chair of OCL (Oxford City Learning) from 2009–2017, a network of secondary education providers across the City, she worked with colleague Heads and Principals to improve achievement and raise aspiration for all learners. In 2015, she led the development of a multiacademy Trust, the Acer Trust, which consists of primary and secondary schools across Oxfordshire, with a core aim of ‘Achieving Excellence for All’. Prior to taking up the headship of Matthew Arnold School, she was the Principal Advisor for Secondary School Improvement at Birmingham City Council. Her career includes advisory work in science education and education leadership in three Local Authorities, as well as teaching in a range of comprehensive schools across Oxfordshire and the West Midlands. She has also worked in Higher Education as Science Education Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham.

Rachel Kruger

Head, The Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls, Ealing

Rachel has taught in comprehensive schools both in the UK and in South Africa, twice in girls’ only schools, and is currently the head of The Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls in Ealing. She is passionate about girls’ only education. As a third generation university qualified female in her family, she works very hard to inspire girls to go to university and specifically into STEM careers. Her school has been part of the Inspire program for some time. At EWS, 99% of the Year 13 pupils go on to University, 25% to Russell Group universities and 40 % to follow STEM related courses. A significant number of the pupils are the first in their families to go to University. Rachel is on the board of the Ealing Learning Partnership and chair of their Pathways and Progression Committee, where they consider the future opportunities available to pupils from Ealing. She is a life-long learner with a very broad field of interests – she has degrees in Music and Maths and an MBA, and is currently studying towards a Law degree.

Susan Hammond

Former Head Teacher, Whitmore High School, Harrow

After studying Natural Sciences and Chemical Engineering at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Sue joined BP and worked in various engineering and commercial roles in the UK and USA. Sue then moved into teaching and was headteacher of Whitmore High School in Harrow, an inclusive community school with 1800 pupils, for 19 years. Sue was also Chair of Harrow’s High School Headteachers Group and Schools Forum and is committed to ensuring all young people have fair and equal access to a high-quality education.

Dr Catherine Dilnot

Senior Lecturer, Oxford Brookes University

Catherine graduated with a degree in Physics from St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She qualified as a chartered accountant and worked with KPMG until moving into academic life at Oxford Brookes University in 1991, teaching in Accounting and Finance. running the undergraduate programme and most recently specialising in research methods. Her responsibilities at Brookes motivated her to want to better understand the choices of subjects and qualifications young people make at 16+ and 18+ and how these choices relate to university and professional/higher managerial careers. She therefore gained an MSc in Social Research Methods from LSE and a doctorate from UCL. She and colleagues at UCL are working on a project using data from large firms to examine how their graduate, work experience and apprenticeship recruitment processes relate to the diversity of successful applicants in terms of social background, gender and ethnicity.

Hong Zhou

Deputy Head of Maths, Gifted & Talented Coordinator and Inspire Teacher Lead

at the Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls

Following her degree in Environment Management from the University of Manchester, Hong trained for a Secondary PGCE in Mathematics. She has taught in both private and state secondary schools. She currently works as the Deputy Head of Maths at the Ellen Wilkinson School for girls, where she also acts as the Inspire Teacher Lead.

Shamim Tong

Solicitor and St John’s Alumna

Shamim graduated with a degree in Jurisprudence in 1997. She then qualified as a solicitor, worked at two of the largest law firms in London for over a decade, and then moved to California.

Richard Waters

Co-founder and Director of Opportuned

Richard studied Geography at Durham University, followed by a Master’s in Climate Risk. He joined St John’s as Access Programme Lead in 2020 after working in Access in the North East. During this time, he established Inspire Primary and embedded targeting, monitoring and evaluation into the heart of the Inspire Programmes. He left the Access Team in October 2023 to begin a PhD at St John’s College, Cambridge, investigating statistical approaches to understanding human migration in response to climate change. Richard is the founder of Opportuned, an educational consultancy company specialising in evaluation and strategy for university access.