Tom Pugh

Tom Pugh is a principal in the Human Development practice. He is based in England and leads our work on early childhood development.

He has worked in the education sector on a range of development programmes. Before Genesis, Tom worked on the Support to RACE II Technical Assistance programme in Lebanon as the programme's education lead. The programme supported the Lebanese Ministry of Education to deliver high-quality services to its Lebanese and Syrian refugee populations. His work focused on complex special needs inclusion, lesson observations and coaching models, and school performance indicators.

Tom has worked for a number of donors (FCDO, World Bank, DFAT and EU) and across a range of technical areas, from early childhood development to complex technical assistance. He programme-managed the midline evaluation of the FCDO-funded, UNICEF-implemented Girls’ Education Project (GEP) Phase 3 in northern Nigeria and led on the endline dissemination of findings.

He provided technical support to DFID’s Governance through Education (Taallum) programme that sought to develop the capacity of provincial educational directorates in opposition-held areas of Syria. Tom’s work also spanned the policy cycle and he has contributed to design and evaluation, as well as the implementation of donor-funded educational programmes.

A primary school teacher, Tom has long-term experience of projects that target pupils from the poorest quartiles, having worked for Bridge International Academies, providing high quality education through low-cost private education in the slums of Kenya and Uganda. In this role, Tom oversaw that the quality of education to about 100,000 pupils was not compromised by the organisation’s ambitious growth strategy in which 50 schools were opened every term.

Tom has a master’s in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) from Roehampton University (UK) and a master’s in Education from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is a primary school teacher, having achieved his qualified teacher status in England from the General Teaching Council in 2007.