Derek Lever has been a practitioner in education for over 50 years. He has taught pupils from 4-16 years of age, was an Acting Head Teacher in three rural primary schools in the 1970s and Head Teacher of two large, urban primary schools from 1980 to 1993. He has run Head Teacher training programmes and also spent twelve months as Head of a Learning and Resource Centre. He has been an External Examiner and an Associate Lecturer at two Universities. In 1993, he was appointed as Walsall MBC's schools' inspector for mathematics 4-18 and subsequently a general school's inspector before becoming Deputy to the Chief Education Officer in 1997. For six years, he was an Inspector for Ofsted and helped establish a Consortium of local education authorities who conducted inspections and trained inspectors on behalf of Ofsted.
He has Bachelor and Master's Degrees in education and added the award of Doctorate at Loughborough University in the 1990s. In collaboration with university colleagues, he has had a range of articles published and a book, 'What do Primary School Headteachers Really Do?' (a LUDEO publication in 1997). He has spoken at international conferences in various parts of the world, including Austria, Denmark, Romania, Portugal and the USA and also arranged and conducted Study Visits for colleagues in/from several countries including Malawi, France and New Zealand. In 2011, he was contracted by a prominent UK company to collaborate on a review of the New York City school effectiveness programme.
