About Ali Durban, MBE

I am the founder of The Single Collective, a leadership coaching practice for MAT CEOs and senior leadership teams in multi-academy trusts. My work sits in the space between CPD and wellbeing: the relational culture that holds a trust together.

I am also the co-founder of Gesher School, three times Ofsted Outstanding and a national model for SEND education. In 2025, I was awarded an MBE for services to children and young people with SEND. Across my career in education, I have raised over £15 million in philanthropic income for inclusive education.

The work

For over twenty-five years, I’ve worked across education and the wider social impact sector as a co-founder, leader, coach, and consultant. What I have learned is simple: meaningful, lasting change rarely begins with systems or strategy. It begins with people, their values, their awareness, and the quality of the relationships between them.

Through The Single Collective, I run Leading from the Inside Out, a ten-month leadership programme for the senior leadership teams of multi-academy trusts. The work builds relational infrastructure, organisational clarity, relational capacity, for the people who lead a trust, sustained over months rather than in short bursts.

Most leadership development for MATs is sold as frameworks and compressed CPD. If another framework was the answer, it would have worked by now. This work is different because it stays with a team long enough for the relational conditions of culture to shift.

Alongside leadership coaching, I undertake strategic cross-system consultancy. This includes researching and authoring evidence-based mapping work, such as Changing the Narrative, commissioned by Wohl Legacy, which maps support ecosystems for young people with SEND.

Outside the practice

I write and speak about MAT leadership, SEND inclusion, and school culture. Recent appearances include the Festival of Education, Education Business Live, and the FED National Education Summit. I have also written for Schools Week on the SEND system, and regularly for The Bridge, Gesher School’s professional publication.

I co-chair the SEND Council at the Foundation for Education Development. I am a trustee of Bloomsbury Football, which works with over 6,000 children and young people each week. I sit on the Education Council of the Autism Centre of Excellence.

Ali has supported me hugely in focusing on myself and my needs both professionally and personally, something I had previously not been good at. Through her superb sessions, I have developed a greater sense of myself in terms of my values, priorities and how to develop my forward thinking much more purposefully. I feel my leadership within my school has improved and that I’m much better at focusing on the bigger picture as well as the busy day to day things which often detract from why I do what I love. I’ve loved the reflectiveness of our sessions which have really made me think and process what I do. Ali’s professionalism and empathy are superb, she’s skilful and gifted in what she does so well.

Steve Phillips, Deputy Headteacher, UTC Swindon

Who I work with

I partner with education and organisational leaders seeking clarity, connection, and change.

• MAT CEOs and senior executive teams in multi-academy trusts
• Headteachers navigating transition or challenge
• Senior leadership teams evolving culture with purpose
• Charities and funders commissioning research and strategic consultancy on SEND inclusion

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