My Personal Bio

Tirzah Elese Bagnulo is a global education leader, learning architect, and researcher whose career spans more than two decades of teaching, school leadership, government consultancy, and large-scale educational transformation across four continents. Holding a Master's in Leadership and Management from the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) and a BA (Hons) in Education and Childhood Development from Kingston and Richmond University, her work is deeply rooted in neuroscience-informed pedagogy, inclusive design, and the science of how children learn, think, and thrive. She is a qualified and accredited ELKLAN tutor, a NeuroEducation alumni researcher, and has trained extensively in autism, SEND, speech and language acquisition, and mental health and wellbeing for young people.Beginning as a classroom teacher and Foundation Stage leader before being headhunted by the UK Department for Education as a national consultant, Tirzah served for over a decade as Strategic Lead for Education and Inclusion Advisory Services within the London Borough of Hillingdon, where she designed and led one of the most recognized SEND and inclusion service models in England, formally acknowledged by the Department for Education as a flagship of excellent practice and studied by neighboring authorities as a model to replicate. During this period she secured and managed a £250,000 DFE funding package to roll out the SCERTS framework across 45 schools in partnership with the SCERTS PhD research team in the USA, served as the national Early Language Lead Consultant for the Every Child a Talker program across 45 settings; halving the ratio of children at risk of speech and language delay from 1 in 3 to 1 in 6, and developed Making Learning Visible, a whole-school pedagogical model adopted across 25 schools impacting approximately 3,500 children, with four schools subsequently receiving Outstanding ratings from their inspectorates.She also served as Chair of Governors for three schools across more than twelve years, including supporting the successful merger of two schools and guiding a school from Requires Improvement to Good with Outstanding features within a single year.As Founder and Head Teacher of ExelAcademy Online — a division of UConnect AI Limited — Tirzah is advancing a new architecture for education that integrates AI-supported adaptive instruction, neuroscience-informed curriculum design, entrepreneurial learning, and genuine mass personalisation. She is the Principal Investigator on the AURORA project (AI Universal Rubric Orchestrating Responsive Academics), an NSF-funded 18-month study examining how human-AI co-orchestration supports STEM learning, identity, and wellbeing among underserved student populations including students with ASD, ADHD, IEP/504 designations, and multilingual learners from low-income communities.Her professional influence extends across England, Malawi, South Africa, Dubai, Spain, and British international schools across Europe and Asia. She is also the founder of Hand in Hand / Manja Othandiza, an NGO established in Malawi in 1998 to support women and children orphaned by AIDS, which trained over 8,000 community members and established four village day-care centres, and which continues to operate today.