Who we are

James Croft

Executive Director

James Croft is Founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Market Reform of Education, and is responsible principally for the organisation’s forums and outreach in respect of government and parliamentary, sponsor, key stakeholder, and practitioner engagement.

James has authored and co-authored a number of reports for the Centre and its partners, including most recently Taking a lead: how to access the leadership premium (2016) and Collaborative overreach: why collaboration probably isn’t key to the next phase of school reform (2015). James comments regularly in the press on education policy.

Gabriel Heller Sahlgren

Director of Research

Gabriel Heller Sahlgren (also publishing as Gabriel Sahlgren) is Director of Research at the Centre for the Study of Market Reform of Education, Affiliated Researcher at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm, Sweden, and a PhD student at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Incentivising excellence: school choice and education quality, which discusses the conditions that need to prevail for choice to produce higher achievement, and of Real Finnish Lessons: the true story of an education superpower, published by the Centre for Policy Studies.

He is also the author of the paper Schooling for money: Swedish education reform and the role of the profit motive, for which he was awarded the Arthur Seldon Award for Excellence.

Gabriel is Editor of CMRE’s Monthly Research Digest.