Author's bio

After a year teaching at a Canadian boarding school, Andrew spent the next seventeen working in Inner London comprehensives, where he helped pioneer media studies as a curriculum subject, wrote and produced plays for young people and was a member of the editorial collective that produced Teaching London Kids, a radical magazine which challenged the educational orthodoxies of the Seventies. He wrote and edited a series of play-scripts and a series of media studies textbooks for Cambridge University Press. His stage adaptation of Gregory’s Girl sold 200,000 copies and was performed around the world.

At the age of forty he set up Double Exposure, a television production company through which he produced his first film, The Stranger at the Gate, in which he and his father retraced his wartime escape and 500 mile walk across Italy for BBC2. The company went on to make a wide range of documentaries and educational series, many of which won awards and large audiences in the UK and US. In 1997 he won the BAFTA for best documentary series for The House, a six-part series that went behind the scenes at the Royal Opera House to much acclaim and controversy.

In 2004 he was creative lead for a consortium which won the contract from the government to set up and run a dedicated digital channel for teachers and parents. He was the CEO and Creative Director of Teachers TV, a unique venture that for seven years won the hearts and minds of the profession and attracted a significant audience of parents. It was widely admired around the world, which did not stop a Conservative secretary of state closing it down just as the Bill Gates Foundation decided to fund a similar enterprise in the US. IN 2011 Andrew went to San Francisco to set up Teaching Channel, which runs to this day.

Andrew is  chair of governors at two London primary schools and a Local Leader of Gernance in Haringey. He lives in Hackney has three children and four  grandchildren.