Yates has been DfE’s main policy advisor since March 2018 reporting into Education Secretary Damian Hinds. Highly engaging and smart, he is a crucial advocate for vocational and technical education in the heart of government. His passion is inclusion and integration, embodied by The Challenge – the social enterprise he co-founded a decade ago, which created the template for the National Citizenship Scheme.
He set up the Social Integration Commission in 2014, which worked with big hitters across the political, policy and academic worlds to produce a series of hard-hitting reports. He’s also been at the sharp end as an apprenticeship provider, creating a one-year programme, Step Forward, for 17 to 20 year-old Londoners to build professional networks.
Yates combines big picture thinking with a hard-edged pragmatism about how policy is delivered on the ground and has won respect and trust from ministers and civil servants alike. Diana Beech and Stian Westlake (No.30), might well be better known to HE wonks – but Yates is key in better linking university policy to DfE’s priority areas.