Nicholas Tate
Dr Nicholas Tate, a British citizen, was educated at the universities of Oxford (Balliol College), Bristol (department of education), and Liverpool (institute of Latin American studies). He is a member of the IB Board of Governors and Chair of the Board's Education Committee.
Following a career as a teacher, teacher trainer and chief examiner in England and Scotland, Dr Tate joined England’s national curriculum council in 1989 at the time of the establishment of the English national curriculum. For the next 11 years, he worked for a succession of public bodies charged with the administration of England’s school curriculum, assessment and qualifications systems, becoming chief executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment authority (SCAA) from 1994 to 1997, and then chief executive of the new Qualifications and Curriculum Authority from 1997 to 2000. Dr Tate was chief adviser to the secretary of state for education throughout the period between 1994 and 2000, under both Conservative and Labour governments. From 2000 to 2005 he was also an adviser to the French Minister of Education.
From 2000 to 2003, Dr Tate was headmaster of Winchester College, one of England’s leading independent boarding schools, founded in the fourteenth century, and from 2003 to 2011 director general of the International School of Geneva, the world’s oldest and largest international school, where the International Baccalaureate was first developed in the 1960s.
As director general, he was responsible for three campuses offering bilingual, French and English programmes to 4,000 students.
Throughout his career, Dr Tate has written a large number of articles on aspects of education and history, as well as seven history textbooks for schools. He gave the IB's annual Peterson Lecture in 2004. He has been governor of three English independent schools, chairman of a charity working with under-privileged young people in the east end of London, and chair of a Swiss environmental education foundation. He is currently a trustee and chairs the governance committee of a US university and, on behalf of the IB, is a member of the Assemblée Générale of the Mission Laique Française.
Since 2011 Dr Tate has been executive chairman of a network of independent schools located in the UK, USA, South Africa and Hungary, four of which are IB world schools and two of which have candidate status for PYP, IBDP and IBCC. He was appointed Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2001, in recognition of his lifelong contributions to education.
