Tom Bentley will be Executive Director for policy and cabinet for the Premier of Victoria, Australia from September 2006. He was Director of Demos from 1999-2006. Prior to that he was a special adviser to David Blunkett MP, then Secretary of State for Education and Employment, where he worked on issues including school curriculum reform, social inclusion and creativity.
Tom’s work focuses particularly on democracy and governance, public services and learning. Under Tom's leadership, Demos came to play a leading role in the formation of policy ideas and analysis of government reform, and became known as a ‘do tank’, providing consultancy and practical partnership alongside its more familiar forms of research and policy ideas.
His publications include: Learning beyond the classroom: education for a changing world, (Routledge, 1998) The Creative Age: knowledge and skills for a new economy (Demos, 1999), The Adaptive State: strategies for personalising the public realm (Demos 2003), Letting go: complexity, individualism and the left (Renewal, 2002), and Everyday Democracy: why we get the politicians we deserve (Demos, 2005).
Aged 32, he lives in Melbourne with his wife and two daughters.
It argues that dramatic changes are set to take place in the next five years in response to mushrooming consumerism, changing patterns of demand, new technologies, the haemorrhage of dentistry from the NHS and fiscal pressure on NHS budgets.
Young people are having more difficulty than ever before in adapting to the world they will enter as adults. We must recognise that learning takes place far beyond the formal education sector and connect what happens in schools to wider opportunities for learning.
Creativity in schools is too important to be dismissed as simply ‘trendy teaching’, and must become a central aim of the curriculum if pupils are to be equipped to survive in the knowledge economy.
The final report of a consultation project with over 150 young people, presenting a direct and authoritative picture of life for young people growing up with social exclusion today, and the implications for policy.
As liberal democracies seek to defend themselves militarily, they appear to be under threat from the very individuality and diversity they sought to defend. In this collection of essays, world-leading thinkers articulate a long-term response to these threats.
This Demos report concludes that there are major opportunities to educate a new generation of pupils in the principles of good design.
This report, which follows on from Open Wide, sets out how dentistry may change over the next fifteen years, and will help all those involved in dentistry to develop strategies to sustain the recent improvement in the nation’s teeth.
This report argues that creativity can be learned, and presents pioneering examples from education, community and business of how this can be done.
This report shows that the problems facing young people at risk are far greater than shown by unemployment statistics or school league tables.
Demos’ manifesto argues that after a century of decline, Britain is ready for a new spring, and it offers a plethora of imaginative policy ideas.
The contributors attempt to understand the enduring appeal of the monarchy and a couple of them argue for outright abolition. Together they ask the question: 'What are kings and queens for?'
This Demos Collection focuses on the family business and sets out a new way of thinking about families in the new economy.
Develop-ment at a local level can help maximise human and material resources by linking environmental improvements to job creation.
This publication is available for free download.
This issue of the Demos quarterly sets out the coming challenges for governments all over the world, focusing in particular on the tools they are using to change cultures.
This Collection argues that network poverty is the real challenge facing policy makers. But social exclusion can be solved through long-term, all-round investments.
The government's approach to tackling social exclusion needs to be rethought if community-based organisations are not to lose the trust of the people they serve.
This book sets out an alternative approach to mass migration, which replaces the illusion of control – fostered by passports and border checkpoints – with the concept of flow management.
In this collection of essays leading thinkers and practitioners discuss the future of the public realm and the renewal of public goods.
Our democracy is in crisis. Party membership is falling; electoral turnout in Britain appears to have bottomed out at a new low and, when asked, we say we distrust governments like never before.
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