Shareen Wilkinson - Chief Education Officer

Shareen Wilkinson is Chief Education Officer at LEO Academy Trust, where she strategically leads education, curriculum, teaching and learning, assessment, and all central education teams (including the inclusion team) across our schools based in London and Surrey. Holding an MA in Educational Leadership and the NPQEL, Shareen is a Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching, a Strategic Board Member for the Wandle English Hub and a member of the Confederation of School Trusts (CST) national Policy Advisory Group. She brings nearly 25 years of experience in raising standards and a proven track record of driving school improvement at scale. Her former senior roles include Executive Director of Education, Local Authority Lead Primary Adviser, English adviser and primary teacher and senior leader. 

Alongside her trust leadership, Shareen is one of the UK’s most established educational authors. With nearly 40 published books and over 100 titles series-edited for global publishers - including Oxford University Press, Hachette Learning, and HarperCollins - her work spans reading, phonics, writing, curriculum design and leadership. She also co-authors children's fiction and non-fiction with her husband, ensuring her publishing legacy is directly informed by her real-world impact in the classroom.

For over a decade, Shareen has served in high-profile advisory roles for the Department for Education (DfE). Her national work includes acting as a KS1/KS2 reading and grammar subject expert, serving as an STA Deputy Standardisation Team Leader for national KS2 writing and most recently reviewing the DfE writing framework. A key voice in UK education, Shareen frequently presents at major national conferences, including PiXL, HfL Education, ResearchEd, the BETT Show, the Festival of Education and for the National Literacy Trust.