Matthew Savage
Email: matthew@monalisaeffect.me
Website (including testimonials): monalisaeffect.me
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/themonalisaeffect/
Area of expertise provided as part of the CIS Affiliated Consultant Network:
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
- Student Well-being
Matthew has worked in and alongside schools for almost 30 years: first as a teacher, then as a school leader and Principal, and now as a consultant and coach. He has always been drawn to the spaces between what schools say and how they feel; between who we think we are and how others experience us; between the map of data and the soil of territory. That is where he does his best listening. And it is where he has found the richest stories.
This lens has been shaped by many things: years of leadership, a lifetime of learning, and the daily practice of noticing what often goes unseen, unheard and unknown. It is also shaped by his own life: by carrying complex disability, by parenting queer, trans, neurodivergent children, by living within and around systems that hold or fail us. These experiences do not define him, but they do inform the way he moves through the world, and the way he pays attention to the stories schools tell – or leave untold – especially at their edges.
He lives on the Isle of Skye, a place that continues to shape how he thinks about systems and the relationships that move within them. The natural environment here invites attention – both to what surrounds him and to what connects us. It reminds him that wellbeing and belonging are not just a human need, but an ecological one too. These threads run through his work, wherever in the world it takes him.
He is drawn to schools that are willing to look inward – honestly, courageously, and with care. To leaders who want to understand and address the tensions that show up in culture and climate, data and day-to-day experience. To communities asking complex questions about who they are, and what belonging really feels like. He does not offer simple answers, but he helps to create the space and the safety to explore the ones that matter most.
Educated at Oxford, but still learning every day, he brings both scholarship and lived experience to this work. His consultancy takes him into schools and school groups around the world, often in sustained partnership over time. He is also an EMCC-registered, practising coach and mentor and, having led an award-winning international school himself, understands the tensions, traps and trials of aligning belief and practice.
A CIS and SENIA affiliated consultant, he also advises Parents Alliance for Inclusion and serves on the boards of international schools in Europe and Africa. With ECIS and tp bennett, he co-created the Liberating School Spaces project, exploring how design can transform our schools into sanctuaries of equity and justice, and is co-chair of the Liberating School Spaces Special Interest Group. He also contributes to the work of Data in Schools, co-hosts the ‘Data Talks’ podcast, and shares his thinking through conferences, publications and networks worldwide.
At the heart of it all is data: reimagined as the signals we choose to hear, and how we choose to listen. When schools use new and renewed ways of knowing to design their cultures and systems, belonging can move from just a promise to a promise kept. This is the work that matters most to him, and he would love to explore it with you.