Page 89 - 2018 Powerlist

NEW Dr Cheron Byfield Later chair of the now defunct national Women’s Business Public Sector & Third Sector
2018 Development Agency – at the time one of the oldest
Governor and founder of King Solomon business support agencies in the UK – Dr Byfield has
International Business School and CEO of
Excell3 also worked as acting director for the Office for External
Development at the University of Wolverhampton. She
was the first black woman to hold a senior management
If anyone meets the job spec of ‘education entrepreneur’, position at the university, where she set up an Enterprise
it’s Dr Byfield. Education missionary, too, probably. Centre to support budding graduate entrepreneurs.
Today she is the visionary behind – and governor In 1999 she founded national education charity Excell3,
of – the King Solomon International Business School in an organisation she is still CEO of and which is aimed at
Birmingham. The free school for 1,260 children, which raising the academic and social aspirations of children
opened in 2015, offers the elite International Baccalaureate from disadvantaged backgrounds.
and was established to help prepare its students to live, She is the author of Black Boys Can Make It, and has
work and trade in the global economy. hosted a number of prestigious national educational
At the tender age of 29, Dr Byfield was appointed conferences including the National Higher Education
managing director of Coventry Women’s Business Symposium at the University of Oxford, and the Raising
Development Agency. During her tenure the organisation the Achievement of Black Boys: National School
was dubbed the “most successful enterprise agency for Leadership Conference hosted in partnership with the
women in the UK” by then Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt. National Union of Teachers.

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