As the Deputy Director for Higher Education in the Department for Education, and responsible for the delivery of the Teaching Excellence Framework, Iain Mansfield has significant influence over one of the sector’s most important and controversial initiatives.
Mansfield joined the civil service from Cambridge and has also worked in science policy and trade. He is also well known for winning the €100k ‘Brexit Prize’ from the Institute of Economic Affairs in 2014 for his pamphlet A Blueprint for Britain: Openness not Isolation which called for shifting the UK’s trade balance away from Europe and plotted a roadmap for Brexit. Ahead of his time on that particular issue, he should be in much demand in Whitehall which is notable for lacking clear thinking about what Brexit might mean… He has also published a novel, Imperial Visions, as IG Mansfield.