Neil McDonald

Neil McDonald became an Associate of EfC at the beginning of 2008. He is a New Zealander who has been working as an International Education Consultant for the last eight years.

He has forty years experience in education initially as a teacher in remote rural schools in New Zealand then in schools in Canada and the UK. In the 1970s and 80s he held a variety of school management positions culminating in the principalship of a large, newly established co-educational secondary school on the outskirts of Wellington.

At the end of the 1980s he took up a position with the New Zealand Department of Education and was closely involved with the introduction of “Tomorrow’s Schools”, the major education decentralisation reforms, as manager of the reform Implementation Liaison Group. With the establishment of the Ministry of Education he became the Chief Advisor Schools for the Ministry. He was also a project manager responsible for the implementation of a number of major school administration and resourcing reforms during the 1990s.

In the late 1990s he left the Ministry to become an independent education consultant. His roles included work in the provision of education and training for out-of-school youth and commissioner responsible for the governance of two at-risk schools.

Since 2000 he has worked on World Bank and ADB projects. In the Republic of Georgia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia he supported local Ministries of Education with the development of policy plans and implementation strategies for up-coming education improvement projects. He has recently completed contracts in the Republic of Azerbaijan, where he assisted the Ministry of Education with the introduction of strategic planning in the Ministry and in schools and regional offices, and the Kingdom of Cambodia, working with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport on strategies for the implementation of the new Education Act and the development and implementation of its associated legislative instruments.