Magpie Authors

Mark has a first-class computing degree and is a primary-trained teacher with many years of both primary and secondary teaching, lecturing (teacher training), commercial educational training and industry experience. He has taught in both all ability and selective schools, leading the introduction of computing across all school key stages several years ahead of government changes.

Mark has worked with Cambridge International Examinations and lead on the development of a number of international Computing publications. He used his international experience to play a leading role in developing the English 2014 National Curriculum Computing Programmes of Study. In 2015, he was involved in the Department for Education consultation on ‘Assessment without levels’.

Mark is a former founding Board Member of the Computing At School group and later went to work for them as National CPD Coordinator where he led various national initiatives funded by the Department for Education and other partner organisations including the Master Teacher programme which he developed from just an idea to a network of 10 Regional Centres with 380+ active teachers. He also architected, co-authored and co-edited the best-selling Hodder Education Compute-IT series for Key Stage 3 but is probably best known for founding the and internationally recognised Digital Schoolhouse project, now delivered by UKIE and powered by Sony Play Station in 30+ satellite schools across England and Northern Ireland.

With his business partner, Somesh Selvachandran, a former programmer from the city, together they founded an online market place, resource repository, planning and assessment platform which they successfully sold to investors in June 2017. These experiences led Mark to contribute to the Department for Education working groups for both education text book guidance and EdTech.