Jesse Elzinga has been head of Sevenoaks since 2020, leading one of the UK's flagship IB schools. A dual US-UK citizen raised on a farm outside Detroit, Jesse sold apples at farmers markets before winning a place at Harvard with a generous bursary, then a scholarship to Oxford. That journey drives his ambition to have one in three Sevenoaks students on a free or assisted place by the school's 600th anniversary in 2032. In this episode, Jesse makes a passionate case for the IB as the best 16-18 education in the world, explains why dropping maths at 16 is not okay, and delivers a surprising controversial opinion: GCSEs are actually great.
