Gillian Hillier is a senior civil servant in the Department for Education, having spent her career in various education-related roles in central and local government.

After under- and postgraduate degrees in politics, Gillian started her career working in the High Court but soon changed direction to join an education non-departmental public body.  Since then, she has worked as the Education Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister in the No.  10 Policy Unit and on a range of policy areas within DfE including leading on radical reforms to the school workforce, culminating in the school workforce agreement of 2003, overseeing the largest programme of school building since the second world war, and heading up significant programmes of reform in youth policy, children’s services and school improvement.

Between 2017 and 2021 Gillian was Director of Careers and Further Education at the DfE and in 2021, she was appointed at Chief Executive of the Standards and Testing Agency.  She was awarded the OBE for services to education in the 2017 Queen‘s Birthday Honours List.

Gillian has two children (twins) in the National Youth Girls’ and Boys’ Choirs.  She was appointed a Trustee of NYCGB in 2020.