Our Trustees
Julius Weinberg (Chair)
Julius is co-Chair of the Buckinghamshire Cultural Partnership and was Chair of Ofsted until August 2020. He was Vice Chancellor of Kingston University until 2017. He qualified in Medicine and trained first as an Infectious Disease Physician and then in Public Health. He also worked in Zimbabwe and in Bosnia for the World Health Organisation during the war. Following a move into Higher Education, he was at City University before moving to Kingston University in 2011. A serial consumer of distance education, he also has degrees in Art History, Education and Psychology.
Jo Adetunji (Deputy Chair)
Managing Editor of The Conversation UK, an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered direct to the public. Before joining The Conversation UK, Jo Adetunji worked as a reporter and editor at the Guardian, covering stories from UK knife crime to the Arab Spring. She was also associate editor of the Guardian's Public network, focused on the civil service. She has also written for The Times, The Independent and Telegraph newspapers.
Polly Curtis (Deputy Chair)
Polly spent much of her career at the Guardian where she reported on health, social affairs and education, before joining the lobby team as Whitehall Editor, writing about government and policy. She went on to be digital editor of the Guardian, then led newsrooms as Editor-in-Chiefat HuffPost UK, a Partner at Tortoise Media and Managing Director at PA Media.
Her book, Behind Closed Doors, an investigation into social services in England, was published by Virago in February 2022 and was a finalist in the Orwell Prize for political writing. In it, she sets a vision for a different way that the state and communities can work together to solve problems. She is now chief executive of the cross party think tank, Demos and serves as a Non-Executive Director of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. Polly lives in North West London and has two children.
Alison Gow
Alison has worked in journalism for more than 30 years, and has held various roles including newspaper and website editor for Wales on Sunday, Wales Online and the Daily Post. She was Innovations Editor and Audience and Content Director, Audio and Video with Reach plc, specialising in the development and implementation of digital journalism, where she also led the award-winning Laudable Podcasts, an initiative for niche and local news audio.
A former board member and President of the Society of Editors, she was recently awarded a Fellowship of the SoE for contributions to the industry.
She currently works as a media consultant and editorial leadership coach.
Simon Lloyd
Simon is a Chartered Accountant who, after spending much of his career in senior financial positions in the Financial Services sector, spent the last few years working for organisations in the not-for-profit/charity sector. He is now a Trustee for several charities supporting a variety of causes including education, social care and the media.
He brings to the board experience of finance, risk management and governance as well as first-hand experience of the charity sector both from a fund raising and grant making perspective.
Simon, who lives in Edinburgh, is also a member of the ICAEW Charity Advisory Group and the ICAEW Scotland Sustainability Group.
Isabelle Roughol
Independent writer, consultant on media leadership and innovation, and journalism instructor. She was a cofounder of LinkedIn's editorial team and led its global expansion across Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia from 2012 to 2020. She received a Bachelor’s of Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and worked as a reporter and editor at The Columbia Missourian (USA), The Cambodia Daily (Phnom Penh) and Le Figaro (Paris).
Richard Scorer
Richard is a Manchester-based solicitor with a national specialist practice representing victims and survivors of abuse and individuals in public inquiries, including the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), the Manchester Arena Bombing public inquiry, the Covid-19 inquiry, the Thirlwall (Lucy Letby) inquiry and the inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess.
He has appeared frequently in press and broadcast media in relation to his legal cases, has written widely for the legal press and is the author or co-author of 8 books. He served for 9 years as a non-executive director of the Big Life Group, one of the country's leading social enterprises, where he became the senior independent director and was for 7 years chair of the Audit & Remuneration committee. He holds a visiting research fellowship at the University of Kent, where he leads an international review of legal and policy responses to abuse in religious settings.
Patrick Swaffer
Patrick is President of the British Board of Film Classification, the independent non-statutory body which provides trusted classification for film and video. He also sits as a Recorder in the Crown Court and is a partner in Media Compliance Services.
He was for more than 30 years a solicitor with the firm Goodman Derrick, specialising in media law and working principally with broadcasters and book publishers. He frequently advised such clients when disputes arose regarding contentious material both prior to and after publication. Patrick was also an IMPRESS board member from 2015 to February 2020, and chair of the PINF board of trustees from 2019 to 2023.