#93 Inside Nord Anglia's Global Campus: Building Connection Across 90 Schools with Lesley Hatton
In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Lesley Hatton, Senior Programme Officer at Nord Anglia Education, about Global Campus — the platform connecting nearly 90 schools across Nord Anglia's international network, and what it takes to design cross-cultural connection at that scale. The conversation draws on 2023 research with University College London that identified four "connection pillars" behind the program's design.
Together, Seth and Lesley explore how Nord Anglia's four connection pillars — self, world, experts, and community — took shape from that UCL research, and the test her team uses to decide whether a proposed activity (a long-requested "mathematics club," a Tanzania expedition, live drawing sessions paired with MIT and Juilliard) actually builds connection or just adds more schoolwork. They get into the harder part of running one platform across dozens of countries with different cultural and legal norms — what gets moderated, what gets held back for a specific school, and why something as simple as an image of a pig can be off-limits in some places. Lesley walks through the six student behaviors her team tracks, including the finding that students at Nord Anglia's most-connected schools score six to ten points higher than their peers on self-reported measures of those behaviors — and closes with what a school outside any international network can realistically borrow from the model.
Key Topics
Key Topics
- The four connection pillars: self, world, experts, community
- 2023 UCL research on intercultural competence
- Designing activities that build real cross-cultural connection (the mathematics club example)
- Content moderation across different countries' cultural and legal norms
- Collaborations with MIT, Juilliard, and UNICEF
- The six student behaviors and the most-connected-schools data
- Building global connection without an international network
Links & Resources
- Global Campus — Nord Anglia Education
- Nord Anglia Education
- Learning Explorations - Nord Anglia's podcast hosted by Emily Murphy: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/learning-explorations/id1673148486
- Seth's earlier Make It Mindful conversation with Emily Murphy on metacognition — https://www.banyangloballearning.com/podcast/45-metacognition-the-first-step-to-lifelong-learning-with-kayla-morehead-and-emily-murphy
- Why Distance Learning, Seth's other podcast — https://www.cilc.org/Members/Why-Distance-Learning-Podcast.aspx
- Banyan Global Cohorts
- World Savvy
- Svitlo School
Guest Bio: Lesley Hatton
Lesley Hatton is a Senior Programme Officer at Nord Anglia Education, where she works on Global Campus, the platform connecting students across Nord Anglia's international network of schools. Before moving into this role, she taught in international schools herself. Hatton studied at the University of Warwick and is based in Reading, UK.
About the Host
Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators — building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts
Creators and Guests
