Jim Cresswell

At Oak National Academy, I have worked in exploratory leadership roles on complex, high-impact problem spaces within a live national public service. My work has focused on early, unstructured contexts where decisions about what should and should not be built have direct consequences for teachers' wellbeing, the quality of education, and the safeguarding of pupils.

A central part of my role has been stepping back from proposed solutions to examine the underlying problems: what outcomes genuinely matter in practice, how interventions affect people over time, and whether building a technical system is the right response at all. Where it is, I focus on forming the initial conceptual and technical shape of systems that can be developed and operated by others with confidence.

At a critical point, I argued for a long-term intervention to address structural delivery risk that was compounding over time: change complexity was rising non-linearly, delivery pace was falling, and meaningful innovation was becoming increasingly unfeasible. Framed internally as continuous improvement rather than a formal rewrite, this work accepted near-term delivery risk to avoid a later, higher-cost rebuild under greater pressure — and four years on, the resulting platform continues to sustain active development.

More recently, this has included leading exploratory work on how Oak's publicly available, OGL-licensed curriculum data and resources can be exposed through MCP tools and hybrid semantic search. The intent is not to build new destinations, but to make high-quality curriculum materials discoverable and accessible where teachers already are — including environments such as ChatGPT — and to make it trivial for developers to access and use this data through a clear, well-designed SDK.

The aim of this work is deliberately indirect: to enable others to create real-world impact beyond Oak itself. By lowering the cost of access to trusted, open curriculum resources, this approach supports third-order impact, where new tools, services, and practices are created by others rather than being centrally designed or owned.

Across Oak, my contribution has been to lead exploration at the point where problems are still forming, hold responsibility for early judgements whose consequences are felt long after the initial decision is made, and create the initial conditions from which durable, ethical, and high-impact solutions can emerge.

My academic background trained me to work deep into the unknown: forming and testing models, reasoning about complex systems at scale, and reframing problems where existing assumptions break down.

My published research in cosmology and large-scale structure focused on anomalous and ambiguous phenomena, prioritising conceptual exploration over incremental optimisation.

This work shaped how I think about systems, uncertainty, second-order effects, and the limits of formal models — instincts that now underpin my exploratory leadership outside academia.

This period included dedicated research into systems change, leverage points, and how digital services might support ecological and social outcomes — work that shaped my current focus on enabling ecosystems rather than building destinations.

Before Oak, I worked across technical and public-sector environments including FT Labs, government programmes, and early-career roles at HP Labs.

At FT Labs I contributed to the award-winning FT Web App — the first HTML5 web application from a major news publisher, which won Best Mobile Innovation for Publishing in 2012. At HP Labs I automated manual testing processes and taught others to use the same systems, changing practice by changing context.

Across these roles, the consistent thread was early-stage work in complex socio-technical systems: clarifying intent, surfacing hidden assumptions, and shaping systems that could evolve safely under real-world pressure.

My undergraduate thesis was on the design and construction of a Theremin — an early interest in building at the intersection of physics, craft, and play.

I previously volunteered as a market gardener with Growing Communities, an organic local-food initiative. Currently I tend an allotment where I breed runner beans and sunflowers, selecting for resilience and genetic diversity rather than ornament.

I'm interested in ecology-informed agricultural practices and bringing perennials into our food and materials supply systems. In 2018 I stood as a council candidate in local elections.

These aren't hobbies — they're the same systems thinking applied outside professional contexts.