8 Influential Principals Shaping Greater Manchester
- Jonno White
- Jul 7
- 17 min read
Last updated: July 2026
Eight school and trust leaders are shaping education across Greater Manchester right now, from single-school headteachers to the chief executives of multi-academy trusts spanning several boroughs. As of July 2026, Greater Manchester's ten boroughs, Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan, are home to a wide mix of maintained schools, academy trusts, independent schools and further education colleges, and the people running them rarely get named together in one place. This list brings eight of them together, each checked against a current, dated, publicly available source before they made the cut.
A note on this list: I compiled it, and I am not on it. I work in leadership and Working Genius facilitation rather than school leadership, and I put this together because the people running Greater Manchester's schools and trusts carry an enormous, largely invisible weight, and rarely get named for it outside their own community. The people below are listed for their own work, not their connection to me.
The eight featured here include three multi-academy trust leaders overseeing schools across several boroughs at once, three secondary and independent school heads, one further education college principal, and one deputy headteacher whose national recognition sits alongside his day job in an Oldham primary school. Between them they cover Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport and Trafford, and represent Catholic, Church of England and non-denominational schools, one further education college, and one long-established independent school. Two of the eight hold an OBE and one holds an MBE for services to education, all three awarded within the last two years.
As Karen Bramwell OBE, founding chief executive of Forward As One Church of England Multi Academy Trust, put it on receiving hers, "I am honoured to have been appointed an OBE." None of that recognition happened by accident, and none of it is manufactured for this list. It reflects work that was already public before this post existed.
Every person named below passed the same test before making the list: a current, dated source naming them, their exact role, and their organisation together, plus a second independent source confirming the same pairing. That test sounds simple, and it is meant to, but it ruled out more names than it let through. A well-known former Greater Manchester headteacher, made famous through television coverage of his school, was excluded outright once research showed he had since been barred from teaching entirely, a detail no amount of past fame changes.
This is also a list built for the long term rather than a single news cycle. Multi-academy trusts change chief executives, schools rename, and headteachers move on far more often than the public profile of any given school suggests, so every entry here carries the date its underlying source was checked. Treat July 2026 as this list's use-by point for currency, not a permanent record, and expect at least one entry to need updating before the next twelve months are out.
Why Greater Manchester's School Leadership Matters
Greater Manchester's schools sit inside one of the most devolved education and skills landscapes in England. The region has its own combined authority, its own school improvement partnerships, and a growing number of multi-academy trusts operating across borough lines rather than within a single local authority. That structure means a single trust chief executive can now carry direct responsibility for schools in five different boroughs at once, which is exactly the situation Daniel Copley describes at Emmaus Catholic Academy Trust, a trust already covering Manchester, Oldham, Stockport, Tameside and Trafford and working toward 67 schools by 2030.
That scale changes what "influential" means in this context. A headteacher's influence used to stop largely at the school gate. Today, a Greater Manchester trust leader's decisions can shape staffing, curriculum and safeguarding practice across dozens of schools and thousands of pupils in one move. The leaders on this list were chosen because their current, documented role gives them exactly that kind of reach, whether through a single well-run school like Stockport School under Ian Irwin, or a five-borough trust like the one Copley leads.
Independent and faith schools sit alongside that trust-led maintained sector rather than apart from it, and Jo Anderson's leadership of Bury Grammar School since its 2017 amalgamation shows why that matters here too. An independent school's governance looks nothing like a multi-academy trust's, yet the same underlying question, who actually holds the role today and what have they built with it, applies equally to both, which is why this list treats independent, Catholic, Church of England, and non-denominational leadership on the same verification terms rather than judging one sector more leniently than another.
Further education deserves the same weight, and Julia Heap's leadership of Hopwood Hall College is the clearest example here of why a "schools" list that ignores colleges misses a large share of the region's education leadership. Hopwood Hall serves students well beyond the age range any secondary school covers, and its Rochdale and Middleton campuses sit inside exactly the same devolved skills landscape as the Combined Authority's other education priorities. Leaving further education out of a list like this would flatter the sixteen-plus age range with a false sense of separation from the schools that feed into it, when in practice the same borough, the same partnerships, and often the same families move between both.
How This List Was Compiled
I chose these eight people for a genuine, current, and independently verifiable contribution to school and trust leadership across Greater Manchester. Each name here comes from a source I could point to directly, a school's own leadership page, an honours announcement, a local news report, or a trust's own website, dated within the last twelve months in every case except where a longer-standing honour or tenure fact needed no fresher confirmation. I checked that each person still holds the role claimed, that their organisation's name is current, and that a second, independent source backs up the pairing of person, role and organisation. I did not rely on conference programmes, speaker bureau listings, or my own recall for any of it.
I started from more than thirty candidate names across all ten boroughs, drawn from honours lists, local news coverage, trust websites, and regional education award programmes. Most of that starting pool did not make it through to a featured spot, typically because a second independent source or a confirmed LinkedIn profile could not be established in the time available, not because the person is not a genuine, current leader. Two names in the original pool were dropped outright rather than softened: a widely recognised former television headteacher who has since been barred from teaching entirely, and a headteacher whose special school had changed leadership since the source crediting them with the role was published.
Steve Hill MBE
Steve Hill MBE is deputy headteacher at St Joseph's RC Primary School in Shaw, within the Oldham borough. He is one of a small number of serving teachers in Greater Manchester named among the UK's Top 100 Most Influential People, a national recognition built through more than a decade of expedition-based fundraising run alongside a full-time teaching role rather than instead of one.
On being named to the Top 100 list in March 2026, Hill said, "I feel incredibly honoured and deeply humbled to receive this recognition." That honour sits alongside an MBE and a National Teacher of the Year award, both earned while he continued teaching full time at St Joseph's rather than stepping away from the classroom.
Known for: founding Team Hill Charitable Trust and being named among the UK's Top 100 Most Influential People in 2026.
Own site: https://stevehillmbe.com/latest-news/
Julia Heap OBE
Julia Heap OBE is Principal and Chief Executive Officer of Hopwood Hall College, the general further education college serving Rochdale and Middleton. She stepped into the top role in 2019 after four years as Vice Principal, and was appointed OBE in the King's New Year Honours for services to further education.
Accepting the honour, she said, "I am truly humbled to receive this honour." Hopwood Hall serves students from age sixteen through to adulthood across its Rochdale and Middleton campuses, one of relatively few Greater Manchester colleges built around that full lifelong-learning range rather than school leavers alone.
Known for: leading Hopwood Hall College's growth as a further education and university centre for Rochdale and Middleton.
Daniel Copley
Daniel Copley is Chief Executive Officer of Emmaus Catholic Academy Trust, one of three Catholic academy trusts covering the Diocese of Salford. Copley has led the trust since September 2021, building on twenty years across Yorkshire schools as a teacher, headteacher and director of standards before moving into trust-wide leadership.
The trust already spans Manchester, Oldham, Stockport, Tameside and Trafford, with plans to grow toward 67 schools by 2030. Marking the trust's Chartered College of Teaching Research Mark, Copley said, "We are proud of this prestigious achievement," crediting the wider trust rather than claiming it as a personal win, a pattern that recurs across Copley's public statements on the trust's growth.
Known for: growing Emmaus Catholic Academy Trust across five Greater Manchester boroughs.
Karen Bramwell OBE
Karen Bramwell OBE is founding Chief Executive Officer of Forward As One Church of England Multi Academy Trust. The trust runs schools across Bolton, Tameside, Bury, Oldham and Rochdale, and she was designated a National Leader of Education in 2009 and now sits on the Priority Investment Board for Greater Manchester.
Bramwell was appointed OBE in the 2024 King's Birthday Honours for services to education. "I am honoured to have been appointed an OBE," she said, adding that the recognition reflected the people she had worked with across her career rather than her own effort alone, a career that has run almost entirely within Greater Manchester's schools and system leadership roles.
Known for: founding and leading Forward As One Church of England Multi Academy Trust across five Greater Manchester boroughs.
John Rowlands
John Rowlands is Executive Principal of Greater Manchester Academies Trust, which runs schools serving north Manchester from the early years through to secondary age. Rowlands moved into the role after serving as headteacher of Manchester Communication Academy, one of the trust's flagship secondary schools.
Speaking about school leadership and staff wellbeing through the BeeWell programme, Rowlands said, "We've got to be brave in this world." That willingness to talk openly about the pressures on school leaders, not only their results, runs through Rowlands's public commentary on the trust's work, alongside fellow Manchester Communication Academy leader Sue Watmough, with whom Rowlands has discussed the programme publicly.
Known for: leading Greater Manchester Academies Trust's north Manchester schools.
Own site: https://www.gmacademiestrust.com/
Ian Irwin
Ian Irwin is headteacher of Stockport School, a mixed secondary school of more than 1,300 students. Under his leadership, the school's most recent Ofsted inspection, carried out in May 2025, found it had taken effective action to maintain the standards identified at its previous inspection.
Irwin holds NPQH and NPQEL qualifications alongside a degree and a master's, and introduces his own role directly on the school's website: "I am very proud as the Headteacher, to welcome and introduce you." That mix of formal qualification and a personally written welcome sets the tone the school is known for.
Known for: sustained leadership of Stockport School through consecutive positive Ofsted outcomes.
Andrew Bridson
Andrew Bridson is headteacher of Cardinal Langley RC High School in Middleton, within the Rochdale borough. The school has been recognised locally through the Raising Rochdale Education Awards, which celebrate schools and colleges making a genuine difference across the borough.
On the wider purpose behind the school's results, Bridson has said, "Our education system works tirelessly every year to make a lasting impact." That framing, of a whole system's effort rather than one person's achievement, runs consistently through his public comments on the school's outcomes, including his messages to families marking each year's GCSE and A-level results.
Known for: leading Cardinal Langley RC High School's recognised contribution to education across Rochdale.
Jo Anderson
Jo Anderson is Principal of Bury Grammar School, the independent school formed in 2017 when Bury Grammar School Boys and Bury Grammar School Girls amalgamated. She has led the combined school since that merger and is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference.
On the school she leads, Anderson has said, "Our School is thriving and in good heart." Bury Grammar School's stability as a single institution since 2017 owes a good deal to that early period of combined leadership under her, continued through her ongoing membership of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference into the current academic year.
Known for: leading Bury Grammar School since its 2017 amalgamation of the boys' and girls' schools.
Notable Voices We Almost Included
Several other Greater Manchester leaders came close to making the featured eight but did not clear the full verification spine in time for this post. Brendan Loughran, Chief Executive Officer of Great Academies Education Trust across the Tameside and Rochdale boroughs, and Rachel Curry, Principal of The Manchester College, are both genuinely current, relevant leaders and are tagged in the companion LinkedIn post below rather than left out entirely.
A handful of others were real, current, and relevant but could not be independently corroborated or confirmed as still findable on LinkedIn within this round of research, including leaders at Prestolee Multi Academy Trust in Bolton, Wellacre Academy in Trafford, and Manchester Communication Academy. That is a gap in this research round, not a judgement on their work, and a strong case for a future, deeper pass on Salford and Wigan specifically, the two boroughs with no representation in this list.
Great Academies Education Trust, led by Brendan Loughran across Tameside and Rochdale, and The Manchester College under Rachel Curry both deserved more space than the follow set alone gives them, and either could easily anchor their own future entry once a fuller verification pass is done. The gap between "tagged in the follow set" and "profiled as a featured entry" in this post is entirely a function of how much independent, dated corroboration could be gathered this round, not a judgement on the scale or quality of either leader's work.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Identifying Influential School Leaders
The first mistake is treating a conference speaking slot or an award shortlisting as proof of current leadership. Programmes and shortlists are compiled well in advance and rarely get updated when someone leaves a role, retires, or moves on, so a name on a 2024 speaker list can easily be wrong by 2026.
The second is assuming a trust's public profile matches who actually runs it today. Multi-academy trusts merge, rename, and change chief executives more often than most people realise, and one trust on this list, Vantage CE Academies Trust, was under an active Department for Education Notice to Improve on governance grounds at the time of this research, a detail easy to miss if you only look at a trust's own marketing pages.
The third is confusing a school's fame with its headteacher's current tenure. Greater Manchester has produced genuinely famous schools through television coverage over the past decade, and at least one widely recognised former headteacher from that coverage has since been barred from the profession entirely, a fact that would be missed by anyone relying on search results alone rather than checking current status directly.
The fourth is inferring someone's pronouns from their first name rather than a source that actually states them. Two of the eight leaders featured here are described without gendered pronouns in this post for exactly that reason: no source found this run stated one, and guessing was not an option. A first name is not a source, however confident the guess feels, and treating it as one is exactly the kind of shortcut that turns a well-researched list into an inaccurate one.
The fifth is padding a list to hit a round number. A genuinely verified list of Greater Manchester principals this month runs to eight, not twenty-five, and stretching it further with unverified names would have made every other name on it less trustworthy by association.
The sixth is treating a single search result as confirmation rather than a lead worth checking further. Search results surface plenty of genuine, current leaders, several of the eight here started that way, but a name, a school, and a job title appearing together in a snippet is a starting point for verification, not the verification itself. Every entry on this list was followed back to the organisation's own page or an independent news report before it was locked in, and several promising leads from search results alone did not survive that follow-up step and were left out.
Implementation Guide: Building on This List
Reaching out or drawing on this list well takes more care than copying names into an email. The following five steps are the order I would work through as a school leader, governor, or trust board member looking to make genuine use of it.
First, check where your own school or trust sits relative to the boroughs and trust structures named here, since a multi-academy trust chief executive is far more likely to respond to an approach that clearly understands their trust's footprint than a generic message sent to every name on a list. Second, follow the public programmes each leader is already visibly engaged with, such as the BeeWell wellbeing programme or borough-level school improvement partnerships, rather than approaching them cold on an unrelated topic.
Third, treat regional recognition events, such as the Raising Rochdale Education Awards or the Pearson National Teaching Awards' North West category, as genuine discovery points for who is being recognised locally this year, not just a historical record. Fourth, if you are considering academy conversion or joining a multi-academy trust, use the trust-level leaders on this list as a starting point for understanding how differently trusts of similar size can be run, since Emmaus Catholic Academy Trust's five-borough Catholic model and Forward As One's five-borough Church of England model already show two different approaches within the same region.
Both of those trusts grew by bringing individual schools into a shared central team rather than by merging existing trusts together, and the practical differences between those two growth paths are usually more visible in a direct conversation with a sitting chief executive than in any published strategy document. That is worth knowing before your first approach, since a trust leader asked to compare growth models cold will typically give a far more useful answer than one asked to justify a decision already made.
Fifth, revisit any list like this one at least annually, since roles, trusts, and even school names change fast enough in Greater Manchester that a list this detailed has a natural shelf life of around twelve months before it needs re-checking.
A sixth, optional step is worth adding for anyone using this as a genuine reference rather than a one-off read: keep your own short record of the date and source you last checked for each person, in the same format used throughout this post. That habit costs a few minutes per person and is the single biggest difference between a list that stays useful for a year and one that quietly goes stale within a school term, especially given how often trust structures and headships change hands across Greater Manchester.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the most influential school leaders in Greater Manchester right now?
Eight leaders are featured in this list as of July 2026: Steve Hill MBE, Julia Heap OBE, Daniel Copley, Karen Bramwell OBE, John Rowlands, Ian Irwin, Andrew Bridson, and Jo Anderson, spanning primary, secondary, further education, and multi-academy trust leadership across seven of Greater Manchester's ten boroughs.
How many boroughs make up Greater Manchester?
Greater Manchester is made up of ten metropolitan boroughs. They are Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, and Wigan, each with its own mix of maintained schools, academy trusts, and further education provision.
What does it mean when a headteacher is a National Leader of Education?
A National Leader of Education is a serving headteacher or trust leader formally designated by the Department for Education to support school improvement in other schools beyond their own. Two of the leaders on this list, Karen Bramwell and Mike Tonge of Prestolee Multi Academy Trust, hold or have held that designation, reflecting recognised system-level leadership rather than single-school performance alone.
Is a multi-academy trust chief executive the same as a headteacher?
Not quite, and the difference matters for this list. A headteacher leads a single school day to day, while a multi-academy trust chief executive, like Daniel Copley or Karen Bramwell here, holds strategic and financial accountability across every school in the trust, usually working through individual headteachers or heads of school at each site. Some trust leaders, including John Rowlands here, move between the two, having led a single flagship school before taking on trust-wide responsibility, which is why several entries on this list describe a career path rather than a single fixed title.
How was this list of Greater Manchester school leaders compiled and checked?
Every featured person was checked against a current, dated primary source naming them, their role, and their organisation together, then confirmed independently a second time before being included. Anyone found to have left their role during that process, including two people considered early in the research, was dropped rather than kept on the strength of an older claim. Roughly thirty candidate names were considered in total, with the featured eight being the ones that cleared every stage of that check within this research round.
Why isn't every Greater Manchester borough represented in this list?
Two boroughs, Salford and Wigan, have no featured or follow-set representation in this round, not because they lack strong school leaders but because this research round could not independently corroborate a specific current leader from those boroughs to the same standard applied everywhere else. That is recorded here honestly rather than papered over with an unverified name.
What is the difference between a headteacher and a principal in England?
In England the two titles are largely interchangeable in everyday use, with "principal" more common in academies, sixth form colleges, and further education, and "headteacher" more common in maintained schools and many independent schools. Both titles on this list, from Ian Irwin's headteacher role at Stockport School to Julia Heap's principal and chief executive role at Hopwood Hall College, carry equivalent day-to-day accountability for their institution.
Can a school leader be removed from a list like this one after publication?
Yes, and that is treated as a feature of keeping the list honest rather than a flaw in it. If any leader named here leaves their role, their organisation changes name, or a source used to verify them is later shown to be wrong, the correct response is to update or remove that entry, not to leave outdated information live because the post has already been published.
Final Thoughts
Greater Manchester's school and trust leadership is more structurally complex today than it was even five years ago. Multi-academy trusts are increasingly running schools across several boroughs at once rather than one local authority holding everything together, and the eight leaders featured here reflect that shift directly, from Daniel Copley's five-borough Catholic trust to Steve Hill's national recognition earned from inside a single Oldham primary school.
What stood out most while compiling this was how much of the strongest evidence sat in plain sight on each organisation's own website rather than in press coverage or social media, which is exactly where this kind of checking should start. A school or trust's own leadership page, read carefully and checked against a second independent source, turned out to be a far more reliable existence check than any speaker directory or awards shortlist.
It was equally striking how quickly a promising lead could fall apart under that same checking. Names that looked strong from a single search result, a well-known school, a confident job title, a recent-sounding mention, sometimes turned out to describe someone who had left the role a year or more earlier, or a school whose leadership had simply moved on since the page describing them was last updated. That gap between what search results suggest and what a direct check confirms is exactly the gap this list was built to close, and it is a gap that widens, not narrows, the longer a list like this one sits unchecked on the internet.
This list will need revisiting within the next year as roles change, trusts grow, and Salford and Wigan get the deeper research pass they deserve. For now, these eight represent the most fully verifiable leadership picture Greater Manchester's schools and trusts offer as of July 2026.
None of these eight asked to be on this list, and none of them will see it before it publishes. That is deliberate. A list built to flatter its subjects into sharing it is a different exercise from a list built to be accurate, and this one was built to be the second thing first, even where that meant a shorter list than a rounder number would have looked.
About the Author
About me: I am a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, certified through Patrick Lencioni's Table Group, and the author of Step Up or Step Out. I work with school leadership teams around the world on building clarity and trust inside their own leadership groups. If that is useful for your team, you can reach me at jonno@consultclarity.org.
Sources
This list draws on nine categories of published source, checked directly rather than drawn from memory. They include each featured organisation's own leadership or governance pages, the Greater Manchester Lieutenancy's New Year Honours List 2026, the King's Birthday Honours List 2024, Oldham Chronicle and Rochdale Times local news coverage, Wikipedia's entry on Bury Grammar School, Stockport School's published Ofsted inspection record, the BeeWell programme's published conversation with John Rowlands and Sue Watmough, and a Department for Education Notice to Improve published on GOV.UK.
Next Read
Four related reads sit on consultclarity.org for anyone wanting the wider picture beyond Greater Manchester. They are 45 Essential Thought Leaders on Principal Burnout, 50 Leading Thought Leaders in UK Education Leadership, 50 Essential UK State School Thought Leaders, and 49 Influential Educational System Leaders to Follow on LinkedIn.