Trustees and Members

The trustees of Bellevue Place Education Trust sit on the BPET Board. The trustees are made up of four sponsor trustees – two appointed by Bellevue Education, two appointed by Place Group – two independent trustees, two parent trustees and one financial expert.

Declaration of Pecuniary and Personal Interests: BPET is required to publish a record of  its trustees’ business and personal interests annually, through the BPET Board Register of Interests.

Board of Trustees

Claire Delaney – Chair of Trustees and founding member

Claire has held a number of Board level positions, most recently as an owner and director of Place Group Ltd and as the Chair of the Bellevue Place Education Trust. As Managing Director of Place Group, Claire has led an organisation that has a 18-year history of supporting major education transformation programmes in the UK. Place has helped local authorities raise more than £4bn to rebuild and remodel school buildings, has established 75 new academies and helped set up over 50 free schools. She has recently set up an education procurement business consulting company, helping public sector organisations focus on optimal back office delivery, efficiency and compliance. Claire brings strategic knowledge of the education sector as well as in depth commercial and business experience. Claire is also a BPET Member.

Mark Malley - Founding member

Mark founded Bellevue Education over 20 years ago and is passionate about education.

In 2003, he took over a troubled London preparatory school which had failed two school inspections and was on the verge of closing. Within a year, Mark had turned the school around, achieving an Outstanding inspection report from the Independent Schools Inspectorate.

The school was graded Outstanding again in its next inspection and by the time Mark left the school in 2011 it was oversubscribed and sharing best practice with other schools.

Mark, now CEO of Bellevue Education, is wholly focused on ensuring that its schools achieve the very highest standards. He also advises other schools on issues such as assessment strategies and school leadership. Mark is also a BPET Member.

Chris Gallant

Chris has worked in marketing, communications and crisis communications for the past 20 years for a range of businesses within the education sector, including school travel, educational IT and training companies, as well as with schools directly. Now he is a Director of Pharos Response Ltd, a risk, reputation and crisis management business serving clients in the education, youth, travel and adventure sectors.

In addition, he has previously been a Parent Governor for an Outstanding primary school in Richmond before deciding to switch allegiance to join the Advisory Board of BPET’s Deer Park School when his daughter first become one of the founding 12 pupils of the school. Chris joined the BPET Board in December 2017 as an elected parent trustee.

Sandeep Jain

Sandeep is an experienced bank Chief Financial Officer (CFO) with over 30 years’ experience, including 20 years at senior positions​ in banks. Currently, he is a financial consultant working with a Middle-Eastern bank on finance and treasury workstreams. Sandeep has previously worked with Standard Chartered Bank, Revver Bank and Bank of Baroda UK Ltd, primarily in CFO and treasury roles, with a focus on business partnering.

He set up a challenger digital bank in the UK from scratch, working through the regulatory bank licensing process. As a country CFO, he has managed large finance teams in multiple locations in the UK, Europe and Asia, being responsible for all areas of finance including IFRS accounting policies, financial management and regulatory reporting, external audits, strategic planning and budgeting, partnering with CEO and business heads.​

He has led and managed end to end projects relating to M&A, financial due diligence, bond issues, transforming finance functions, integrating acquisitions in multiple countries, finance systems implementation, designing and implementing financial controls.​ He has been a regular participant and member of different boards, and regularly presented at the Audit and Risk Committees. Sandeep holds an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.​

Besides London and Manchester, Sandeep has worked and lived in Mumbai, Singapore, New York and Jakarta. He currently lives in London.

Ralf Jeffrey (Vice Chair)

Ralf has worked in technology since the early 1990s having founded and run a number of businesses, and since 2007 consulted to a diverse range of organisation such as Old Mutual, Hargreaves Lansdown, Wayfair, Santander, O2, Aviva, M&G, Coutts and many more, helping them to transform the way they design, build and manage technology. He has worked in the UK, South Africa, Australia, Germany and the USA.

Ralf firmly believes that future generations should leave school with the knowledge and understanding of how to work within a technology enabled world. This means not just knowing how to use the technology, but understanding how it has changed the ways in which people interact within the workplace. Ralf's area of expertise covers cyber security.

Cara Demetriades

Cara is a finance and operations professional who brings over 15 years of school business management experience to the BPET Board. As a past pupil of one of the BPET schools, she has a personal dedication to the trust's mission. Cara transitioned into education after a successful corporate career, which included serving as Director of Operations and IT at Barclays Capital. She has extensive experience developing strategy across both independent and state schools. Additionally, Cara is an accomplished fundraising consultant who has driven a range of community sports projects across London and the South East in partnership with Sport England, the London Marathon Trust, and the Football Foundation.

David Hatchett

David Hatchett is the CEO of Anthem Schools Trust. An experienced executive leader, David has held senior positions across two large, national multi-academy trusts, a FTSE 100 company, and across and within schools. David has also served as an Ofsted Inspector of schools for many years, worked as an examiner, and co-authored a series of educational textbooks for a leading publisher. Beyond his executive leadership, David holds extensive governance experience. He currently serves as a Board Trustee for two charities: Parentkind and the English-Speaking Union, where he also chairs the Education Committee. His previous governance experience includes as a Governor at a successful sixth form college in London, Chair of an academy trust in Middlesbrough, and as a member of an NHS Board.

Justin Khaksar

Appointed in Dec 2025. Biog to follow shortly.

Trustee Attendance Record 2025-2026

For the attendance record for previous academic years, these are contained in the Audited Accounts for the relevant academic year.

Members

Claire Delaney and Mark Malley are both BPET Members.

Mervyn Douglas

Mervyn Douglas joined SVG Advisers in 2011 as a senior member of the investment team and sits on the SVG Capital Investment Committee. Prior to joining, he was a fund manager at Aviva Investors where he was responsible for the management of over £2 billion of UK Equities and the UK research analysts. Previously he was a UK equities fund manager at Legal & General and Schroder Investment Management. Mervyn achieved his AIIMR qualification and has a degree in Law from Nottingham University. Mervyn brings senior strategic business and finance experience.

Emma Thompson

Emma Thompson became a Member of BPET in May 2019. Emma has worked at Equality Now as the Director of Marketing and Communications since November 2017. Emma has spent nearly two decades developing creative marketing, brand and communication campaigns for not-for-profits organisations. Beginning her career at one of world’s biggest cancer research charities, she then moved on to work on three general elections at the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. Most recently, Emma served as the Marketing Director at the Royal Society for Blind Children. She holds a B.Sc. in Politics from Plymouth University in the UK and is accredited from the UK’s Institute of Direct Marketing.

Martin Chilcott

Chairman and CEO 2degrees Ltd and Manufacture 2030. Founder and non-executive director of The Innovation Gateway Ltd. Martin is a purpose-driven, environmental and digital entrepreneur whose focus for over 30 years has been on launching new, disruptive businesses that catalyse large scale change to industries to improve their social and environmental impacts. Martin was the founder and CEO of one of the UK’s earliest digital agencies, Clarity IBD Ltd. On its sale in 2000, he worked briefly in corporate IT as Global Head of Innovation at Proxicom Inc., and then as Group Marketing Director for Dimension Data plc. In 2003, he co-founded the education consultancy Place Group with Simon Rule and Claire Delaney and then went on to set-up clean energy incubator Meltwater Ventures and the sustainable business network 2degrees.

Last updated: March 2026